Imagine
What if you had done the sensible thing and gotten a degree in accounting? And had worked your whole life doing a nine to five job that paid well? And went on real vacations instead of using all your time off to write in a hotel room or to go to conferences to get better and then later promote your work?
What if you watched television and movies and thought, Wow, that was cool, but never felt an urge to do it better yourself? What if you read books occasionally, just for fun, not because they were breath and life to you? What if books didn’t matter and you never thought about the people who wrote them and wondered what they would be like in person?
What if you never dreamed that someday someone would tell you what your book meant to them, the way that you want to tell your favorite writer the same thing?
What if you were normal? And didn’t itch for a life that was more than ordinary? What if you just punched your card day after day, and looked forward to retirement because then you could figure out what you really wanted to do, even if that was mostly hang out on beaches?
Sometimes I find myself saying to my children that I wish I’d been more sensible, that I’d gotten a “real” job and that I didn’t spend so much mental and emotional energy worrying about my work, wishing I could do it better, being hurt by those who write nasty reviews, and having my sleep messed up by dreams I’m apparently supposed to write down and turn into another book. What if I could be finished at the end of the day and not be on call to the muse 24/7, while trying to figure out how to be big enough and strong enough to tell yet another hard story?
Well, I guess I wouldn’t be me. I don’t know who I would be. I’m sure I would be a perfectly good person with many good qualities. I’d have family and friends around me, relationships that are meaningful to everyone. I’d never think about if I was leaving a legacy for the future and I wouldn’t care.
It might be an easier life. But would it be happier?
I guess these are the questions that only a writer thinks about. I don’t know how I could have ended up as that person, but I do know that isn’t the person that I am. Could I change that? Maybe I could.
But here are the things that I have purchased in exchange for giving up that other life:
1. Emails from people who thank me for doing my work.
2. The occasional review from someone who really gets it.
3. My editor’s scrawled comments telling me I got something just right.
4. Meeting other authors who are going through a lot of the same things that I am.
5. Stretching myself past what is comfortable for me to learn new things and about other lives than my own.
6. The pleasure of putting together a perfect sentence, even if no one will ever read it but me.
7. Writing for myself first and foremost, and discovering who that self is.
8. Having an idea that just insists on being written down, an invisible something that will only ever exist if I allow it to.
9. That breathless sensation of feeling your way through a first draft that might just be the best thing you’ve ever written.
10. Being in the middle of something else and having an idea strike you that transports you away, sometimes for only a moment, sometimes for an hour, so that you come back like a weary, beleaguered traveler, unsure where your body has landed.