“The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.”

“To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you… a truth… that used to elude you.”

“I have written a great many stories but I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.”

“Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.”

“As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.” ~ Carl Van Vechten

To me, being a writer has a lot in common with the way I feel about living with a cat.

Cats can be difficult. They wreck your furniture. They wake you in the middle of the night, retching up fur-balls. They have no compunction about using their claws and teeth on you whenever they deem it necessary. For instance only last week my ‘darling’ Kuffer played rough and sliced open my lip so badly that I thought I might need stitches!

But all these issues fade into insignificance when a cat purrs at you when you’re sad, or snuggles up against you when you’re worried or ill. Or simply delights you by doing something cute or funny or loving clear out of the blue and just because he or she can.

Even without consciously being aware of it, cats give back a hundredfold to compensate for any trouble they might cause you.

It’s the same with writing.

Ideas are hard to find. Plots seem impossible. A work in progress can be a dead duck that drives you crazy and makes you wonder if you’ll ever write a single interesting word, ever again.

But all this angst is forgotten in those breathtaking moments when your characters are suddenly alive and talking and acting in a world that you, yes you, have created. When they make you smile and exclaim and sigh and they reward you for all the effort and the stress and the swearing that you’ve expended on them. The moments when your eyes fill with tears over their trials and tribulations, and when your heart sings at the end of their story because they’ve achieved the beautiful happily ever after that can be so elusive and hard to hang on to in the real world.

That’s why I write. Because when it purrs you forget the scratches and the fur-balls.