Living Your Writing Life

The Mental Machine
Writers spend most of their time...well...writing. Their minds are like machines that create stories and ideas they turn into written works. But, writers are also inextricably linked to the underbelly of the world around them. Down through history, some of the most famous writers, like Wordsworth, Dickens and Wolff have been social reformers. Other writers like H.G. Wells inspired hi-tech changes that could only have come from the minds of these creative writers. The written works of philosophers give impetus to the literary social reformers and are a balm of tranquility to those least accepting of rapid changes. As with the Industrial Age, the Literary Age never loses its patina of creativity.

Living Your Writing Life
Distractions and minutiae exist all around us. Writers find distractions detract from their steady stream of mental motion. To live your writing life, it's often necessary to step back from the activities of the rat race and retreat into the world between writer and keyboard. On the other hand, writers have a keen sense of regeneration of their creative juices. They know when their pipeline of creativity is flowing all too slowly. It's at this point, they wander into their own worlds of introverted relaxation. For some, that may be a long, slow walk on the beach, a dalliance into nature in a thickly wooded area, traversing a mountain path or riding a bicycle in a solo quest for reestablishing touch with the world. Many writers find it difficult to engross themselves in hobbies. Writing is their hobby, their daily activity and the all-encompassing part of their lives.

Married to Writing
When writing is what individuals love to do most, it's difficult to establish working relationships with others. The world of the writer is a marriage unto itself. Unconsciously, writers take the same marriage vows for their writing as others do with marital relationship. Writers love and honor, in sickness and in health, till death do they part from their lifelong love affair with writing. Don't be fooled that there isn't an enormous amount of emotional security in being a writer. It is, perhaps, the only relationship of humankind that is worthy of total trust and offers lifetime commitment with no strings attached. In such an exclusive relationship, the obvious result is an ongoing consciousness of the power of the written word. A single word can be earth-shattering or world-shaking to the reading audience. This is the reason so many fiction writers manage to have social influence and inspire social reform. Writing is a marriage of verbal convenience to the most talented writers among us.

Prepare to Live Your Writing Life
Few writers are socially active butterflies who flit from one party to the next. These introverts prefer small groups of literary comrades in arms. To prepare to live your writing life, it's important to recognize the writing environment you consider the absolute necessity to produce your most effective literary works. Many writers use pen and pad to write. Others prefer a desktop or laptop computer. The next time you see a writer at work, take note of the expression on their faces. Intense, right? You're seeing the individual writer drawing from the deepest depths of their mental well. There is no one, save the characters in their stories, who comes between writer and story, at that unique juncture in literary time. Not even a military troop of one hundred could pry the writer from that moment. Be prepared to dive deeply into that mental well every moment of your creative writing life. You'll eat and take power naps where you write. In the middle of the night long after you've gone to sleep, you might wake and realize you have the final chapter of your novel. Writing is your life and your true vocation.

If you are already a writer, you knew this. Didn't you?