Something I keep forgetting… or…well, life keeps interfering with.

Epictetus
If you wish to be a writer; write!

Now, off to follow his advice.

“Time is a created thing. To say you don’t have time is to say ‘I don’t want to.’” – Lao Tzu

Sometimes I forget this, but you know, it’s SO true. Even if I’m away from the computer all day, I could write on the little notepad I carry, while waiting for my lunch order. Or I could dictate into the little voice recorder I keep in my purse. If I don’t do these things, I generally use the excuse, “I didn’t have time to write today.” But really, I did. I just didn’t make a big enough effort to make it.

I swear, I’m going to print out this quote and glue it to my forehead. Okay, maybe not my forehead, but someplace prominent. Like my husband’s forehead.

Okay, off to make some time!

“Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.”

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time…The wait is simply too long.” Leonard S. Bernstein

I don’t have a muse. Not really. There are times when the story drives me and I need to write it or it’ll make my head explode! Those times are wonderful and the words fall from your fingers like driving rain and you’re so in the moment. Writing is total joy when you’re in that space.

But you know, the life of a writer isn’t always that way. At least not my life. Sometimes I just don’t want to do it. I want to sit on my couch, eat nachos and watch reality television while I pretend not to hear my sons fighting or breaking something.

Sadly, if you choose the latter, you don’t finish your book on deadline. In fact, you don’t finish at all because sometimes writing is exhausting and unpleasant work and you have to force yourself to sit there and do it. If you don’t, if wait for some sparkly, shiny moment, you won’t finish. You’ll abandon the manuscript when you hit the dreaded middle or you’ll rush through revisions and it won’t be as good as it could be and an editor might take a pass on it because it just didn’t catch her eye.

Every bit of effort you give to your manuscript matters. it’s not always easy. It’s not always joyful. But there’s nothing in the world like finishing a book and sending it off, knowing it’s the best you could have made it.

“It’s an adrenaline surge rushing through your body. You have this spark of an idea that keeps threatening to burst into flames and you have to get the words out on paper to match this emotion or picture in your head. After this comes the work of cleaning up the mess you made.”

“The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.”

“There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

“I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn’t, I would die.”