September. School starts and life switches gear again. One of my daughters used to start getting antsy in the middle of summer when she was little, and by August she was writing out schedules for the school year - when she’d get up in the morning, when she’d do her homework, when she’d practice the piano, etc. She longed for school to begin and to get back to discipline.
As writers, we need schedules and discipline too. But unless you’re taking a writing class, you need to create your own sense of going back to school or to work. You might write a passionate poem or short story flying on the adrenaline of inspiration, but very little ever gets written that way. Or rewritten. (And the bottom line is that writing is really rewriting.)
So, you show up at your desk, or the kitchen table, or a secluded table at a coffee shop, and you write your way into whatever you need to put on the page. You show up every day to write, and you thank heaven that you can sit there and write and not have to lay bricks or clean toilets or be subjected to a tyrant of a boss or drive a truck through miles of smog – at least not for the time that you get to sit there and write. As Brenda Ueland says in her wonderful book, If You Want to Write, “Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.” I agree with all of that except for the part about it being easy. But it is a privilege to write and I try to remember that.
And speaking of writing in coffee shops – according to various newspapers, J.K. Rowling has been spotted writing in cafes in Scotland. Here’s a woman who has made a billion dollars, and she’s still showing up to do the work.
That’s all you have to do too. Show up and write.
