Writing When I Feel Like It

I didn’t want to write today. So I finally went and found it. That quote that’s been gnawing at my conscience since 1982.

I’ve thought about it every now and then. And I knew exactly what book it was in (hiding in my "writer's bookshelf" down in the basement). Not that I needed to see it, as I had remembered it verbatim. A quote from mystery writer John D. MacDonald published in the The Mystery Writers Handbook, edited by Lawrence Treat.

It was in the chapter titled “When and How Do You Write,” which dealt with writing and discipline. While many of those interviewed talked about specific routines and times, MacDonald was more philosophical about the whole thing: “…Any writer who writes only when he ‘feels like it’ is perhaps not only an unsuccessful writer, but quite possibly an unsuccessful human being. (I am not using success in any strictly monetary sense).”

Yeah, it stayed with me. Not because I had heeded his advice, but because I knew I’d been dodging it all these years. It was much easier to let it make me feel like crap every now and then than it was actually doing something about it. Maybe that’s why I stopped reading MacDonald.

Of course, MacDonald makes a strong case for a basic truism: If you really want to be successful at something, whether it is writing, piano playing, motorcycling, parenting, carpentry or teaching, you need to keep working at it.

This is also the message of Glenn Kurtz’s beautifully written Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music(Vintage books, 2007). Having spent much of his youth trying to master the classical guitar, Kurtz realizes that his practice has fallen short of ensuring his perfection. Picking the instrument back up many years later, Kurtz concludes that “…whatever ‘music’ is for you, if you practice for real, eventually it will show you everything that is within you.”

While I think Kurtz is much harder on himself than he need be – if I could play guitar the way he describes, I think I’d be the happiest person in the world – he is a excellent writer and definitely worth reading.

As for myself, I feel quite good about my writing and almost as good about my humanity. I’ve published a couple of things and while I don’t write everyday, I think I write well. Of course, there are those times when laziness gets the best of me, Like not wanting to write today.

Maybe I can find my discipline here on the Orange Highway. Maybe I can make this the place where I finally write with some regularity. Where I finally heed that famous mystery writer's admonishment.

I’ll see what I feel like.