Lulu Blog

A dear friend of mine told me the other day that she couldn’t understand how I was able to write. “I just sit down at my computer and, well, eventually I start writing,” I told her.

“No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t understand how you can make yourself do something that is so incredibly frustrating to me. I hate writing — I can’t believe you do it for fun.”

I replied, “Well, it’s not always fun.”

Because as we writers know, it isn’t always fun. Sitting down to write, there are always those “no good, very bad” days where writing isn’t something that relaxes us or even something we take pleasure in. It drives us insane. We want to do anything but write. (The Internet seems like a great place to hide from writing. Talk to any writer and they can tell you all about the most mind-numbing waste-of-time websites on the Internet and how they have spent considerable time there.)

So why do we stay writing, even as day has turned to night, a long frustrating night into another bleary-eyed morning? Why do we keep writing something that might never find a huge audience, or something we know is just going to get cut in edits?

I believe that’s where work ethic comes in, and even though only a few lucky people on this Earth get to call writing a job, there is some aspect of being a writer that demands you take it as seriously as your job. You are producing art, but you are also doing “work.”

That’s the separation between people who write opportunistically and without much labor and writers who have to sit and struggle through a piece, and toss and turn all night because wow-does-that-scene-stink. Sometimes you have to force yourself to write, just because you told yourself you would. Even if nothing good comes of it, at least you put more hours into your craft, your strange and beautiful desire to translate and work through ideas on a page.

A writer’s work-ethic comes from the knowledge that it’s not that first hour where you write your best, but that third or fourth. That moment when the words (after losing all sense from endless re-reading), begin to coalesce into something extraordinary and true. A writer’s work-ethic is knowledge that the payoff isn’t always in the moment of writing itself, or even publication, but the fact that you participated in part of a long history of a phenomenon of inward-thinking and art. It’s beautiful to be a part of, even if it’s not always fun or prosperous.

So the next time someone asks you why you write, why you can’t make an event or go out that night because you have to do it, and why you can’t just write another time,  maybe it’s best just to say, “Because I need to. Because I want to.”

Photo credit to @jjpacres on Flickr.

During an author interview, have you ever been asked about how you write? Do you type on a computer, use longhand, record your own voice…? This question is asked so frequently that it’s become cliché, but it does raise an interesting point: does varying your writing process add variety to your writing itself?

Writing on a mobile phone or tablet offers the portability of a pen and notebook, while also allowing writers to use the resources of the Internet or even incorporate pictures. How can a description of a city scene be enhanced by a picture of that exact scene? Should it? Tablet writers must deal with the endless possibilities technology offers – possibilities which could distract from the work itself. As the celebrated young author Wells Tower said in an interview with the Huffington Post, “My main gripe with the Web is that it’s toxic to the kind of concentration fiction writing requires. It’s difficult to write good sentences and simultaneously buy shoes.” Perhaps writers who are less focused on the Internet, and more focused on the crafting of fine sentences write better, and maybe the way they write makes all the difference.

Personally, I need to shut off the Internet if I’d like to get any writing done. There are far too many distractions on the Internet to waste the precious time I find to write. But I also appreciate the new possibilities that technology has availed us to, including the ability to write interactively, using the Internet to enhance your perception of a scene, or even allow you to incorporate technology into your writing. While writing on a cellphone or tablet is a far cry from a notebook, it does not seem like writing has changed fundamentally because of their invention. If anything, the introduction of technology into my writing practice allows my writing to be more experimental, more informed, and more current.

How has how you write affected what you write?