Sentanced for Life

Somehow, it still surprises me to hear or read a comment from a fellow writer indicating that they, too, are experiencing some sense or feeling I'd believed to be exclusively mine. That I am not the only one staring out past the rain streaked glass on a dreary day waffling back and forth over what I should be doing, but am not - not so enthusiastically hunting for whatever it will take to sober-up my stagnant self and kick my way past whatever impenetrable barrier my resistance has erected between me and the waiting keyboard.

And yet I know better, a recognition (or maybe confession) that merely works to increase the frustration. After all, can I truly be so self absorbed as to fall to the belief at times that I'm wholly alone, dragging my tattered baggage through a deserted rail station that hasn't seen a train in fifty years? Thus I'm convinced that a writer's melancholy is the byproduct of gray skies and gloomy weather. After all, I rarely feel so tragic on a golden sunshiny day.

Ordinarily I am the most regimented writer you will ever meet - excepting when I am not. When I convince myself that I absolutely positively need a quickie nap to refresh a drooping mind, or turn up the volume on the inner voice in my head that insists on the importance of catching an afternoon movie - not as a diversion from the art of creation, but as necessary food for a temporarily stalled imagination. Just as an afternoon spent surfing the web is research and not simply wasted time that should've been spent face-to-face with the manuscript in progress.

It's funny really, how well I see through my own tricks and excuses, yet that's not to say that I altogether understand why writers so often play these ridiculous games with themselves. If we don't absolutely love it, if writing is such torture, we can simply walk away - become a brain surgeon or Supreme Court Justice -- we don't have to write.

And yet, we do. We do because not to write is impossible - unimaginable. Because even when we cheat the muse and play hooky from the keyboard, we are dreaming words, characters, and scenes in our heads, knowing we will find no rest until we have laid them out on the waiting page.