On Writing

This chick HERE looks back on the time writing her book as being tortuous, and includes a line I myself have used while referring to someone else:

Then I came back to New York and set about writing, a thing I believed I loved to do. I was wrong. I liked having written things. Writing them was the worst.

My bold. I think that’s very true – a lot of people would like to have written a book, and talking about it at parties and such, but very few people love the down-in-the-weeds, slugging it out part that is the actual writing. Of course that’s probably true of anything, really. I’d like to hang out at whatever my generation’s version of Toots Shors is and regale everybody with my stories of playing center field for the Yankees while banging out Blake Lively, but I’m not terribly interested in putting in the work to get there.

I completed my first novel late last year, and was pleasantly surprised with how much I loved the process of it, the lost hours and isolation. Surprisingly enough to a lazy-ass like me, I found out that the actual writing IS what I like best – the surprises that came along as I typed, the stories and sentences I didn’t even know I had in me. I jumped out of bed every morning, excited about what I knew I’d be writing, and what I didn’t know I’d be writing. For the first time in my life I felt like I was where I was born to be.  As the months of writing went on I began to think of my manuscript as a living thing and, throughout long stretches of loneliness and depression, found it to be as comforting and giving as an old friend. It was my best friend.

It’s been months since I finished, and now the pages are stacked neatly and tucked away in an old desk drawer. Okay, saved as a Word file on my desktop. I really don't care about it at this point. I’m pretty sure it will never be published, or read by anybody or affect anybody else, but the very act of writing it completely changed my own life. I’m glad I wrote it, but I know I’ll never look back at a day like today and think boy, I really miss looking back on writing my book.

What I miss is actually  writing it.

I’m writing another book now, even though I don’t have any idea where it’s gonna go and it’ll probably peter out halfway down whatever hole I'll have chased it. But it sure feels good to be lost in that hole again with an old friend.