This Writing Life: A Guide to Some Effective Core Strategies and Mindsets for the Writer

Through all the tragic stuff I've experienced and with all the crazy financial ups and downs and loss of a home and sleeping in my car one year right up to Christmas, I would not change this writing life of mine. This writing life makes me who and what I am. The writing life surely is not for everyone, but then again it's as Abraham Maslow said: the writer needs to write, and the true writer needs to live out the writing life.

This does not mean that there is never a place for what most of the world ignorantly, and jealously I think, calls a "real" line of work. There might come a time and a place when such is needed, sadly. But, this must always be seen as something temporary, transient, fading away even as you are engaged in it to put bread in your mouth. You have to always come back to the writing life. You have to be driven off, down roads to places you've never been to before; you've got to hammer your thoughts into unity until you are exhausted and then get back up and hammer on it some more.

If you want to be doing this right, then you have to be living on the margins, pushing the grain. This writing life is a demanding taskmaster, but also gives the most generous rewards...but only if you can pass the test of time. Enduring through time is everything for the writer and the writing life, until at last the rock splits open after you have at last touched it right, and the silver waters of life flow forth.

But what does any of this mean for you, the writer?

It means that you don't wait for a Muse to fall dove-like upon your head or shoulder; you call to her by putting on your writing hat and coming to sit at your writing desk every day. Sitting and staring with intent at the blank sheet or the blank page on the screen until blood is sweating from your pores is part of the writing life, just as are those moments of divine intervention or "eureka", the kind of energy that allowed Bizet to write the libretto to "Carmen" in only 13 days, and lets Piers Anthony write a new novel every three months or so. Spending four hours to come up with eight words is as much a part of it as having times of writing eight thousand words in just four hours.

But you want to keep a couple of things in mind in this writing life that you have chosen or are thinking about choosing. You don't want to work too hard. This might, on the surface, seem like laziness, or a recommendation for laziness, but that's not the matter at all. It's a matter of intelligence. You see, strategies for producing more and better writing-especially better, as in higher quality, which is what any great writer truly goes for; saying too much is worse than saying too little or even nothing at all, and being prolific without producing quality just means a lot more unwanted bastards enter our crazy world-are the same as those for being a better salesman. Remember, "hard work does not pay." It really doesn't. Smart work, in writing just like in marketing, is what pays.

Ironically, writing well is probably the most difficult work in the world, other than growing up and honestly knowing yourself. But then again, to be a great writer, you need to do that latter thing, too.

So. What is the writing life all about? It's about spending all morning putting in a comma and spending all afternoon taking it out. It's about thinking so hard over just a few words that you melt the box. It's about staring out the window for hours on end. And all the while, trying to make sure you're well fed.

You think it sounds easy? Try it. You'll find out.