The Writer’s Life: Upsides and Downsides
I get to work from home.
Upside: You can write all day in your PJ’s if you want to. Washing your hair need only happen twice a week. Showering isn’t really even essential: the only person who gets to see you is the person delivering your online shopping to the door. Gas to the office costs nothing. You never commit road rage in your quest to not be late. No one monitors how long you spend on the Internet. You can take a personal phone call. Or twenty. You can do nothing all day and lie about it – no one knows what you were going to be doing anyway, so how can they punish you for things they don’t know about that you haven’t done? You set your own deadlines. You have no one sabotaging them, no one stopping you from reaching them. The sky is therefore the limit to what you can achieve. Though, admittedly, your achievements usually fall far short of the sky. Because…
Downside: Sometimes being steps away from your bed, the fridge, and the cupboard where you keep your alcohol, is a curse rather than a blessing. Sometimes you are lonely and have no one to have a chuckle with or to sound off to. The cat and the dog don’t cut it. You discover their intellectual limitations pretty fast when you attempt to take a coffee break with them and engage them in a spot of plot problem-solving, and all they do is purr at you, or give you a pair of your own socks to play tug-of-war with. Then other times when you’re far from lonely and your writing is on a roll, people won’t leave you alone. They knock at your door, peek in your blinds, try to coax you with warm cookies. They know you are in there. When you try to ward them off by insisting that you keep proper office hours, they smile that smile that says that they think you are just trying to sound like a normal person – not a kept woman – which half of the neighborhood assumes you are anyway, because you walk your dog at random hours of the day.
Once in a while you get the urge to physically harm telemarketers. Sometimes that actually feels good.
You create entire fictionalized worlds in which you get to live for the time it takes to write a book.
Upside: It’s unbearably fun when you come up with a great book idea. When after very little thought, you already have a good sense of who your characters are, of their individual challenges, and even how things will end for them. You see the book soaring up the bestsellers lists; maybe even being made into a movie. You will write this book in half the time it has taken you to write the others. You are so excited to make it all happen that you don’t even bother mapping out the book. You just dive in and start writing in your toothpaste-stained sweatshirt, with a serious case of bed-head. At this point, you love your life. You think yourself incredibly lucky that someone is paying you to be a writer. Woo-hoo!
Downside: This lasts for about the first chapter. Then you realize that, knowing your beginning and knowing your end are just brackets that frame a big problem: you’ve got no plot. A plot is the life you give to your characters and the journey you take them on. But you can’t give your characters a life when you don’t really know them. And like people, characters in books are hard to get to know. Trying to force a plot is like trying to pull out your own tooth with a pair of pliers. Surely it’s best then to just let a plot closely mirror life? It just flows on from some place where it begins… But the story of your own real life has a slow unfolding every day. Sometimes not much happens. Sometimes you go nowhere. But if nothing much happens in your plot, and it’s going nowhere, then, alas, so is your career. Despite the theoretically fabulous process of writing a book, by the time you finally write the words The End, you realize you have never been more relieved by anything in your life – except when you wrote your other two books, and the memory of that is still so traumatic that you’ve never re-read them since they got published. But then an odd thing happens. A tiny part of you knows you will miss laboring over that book because when every time you read it, it makes you laugh and cry in all the right places – where you imagine your readers will laugh and cry too. To care so passionately about the lives and loves and heartbreaks of people who don’t even exist, yet can reduce you to such extremes of your emotions, feels like your own best measure of success. And then you realize that must make you slightly off your head. There surely has to be a less madcap way to earn a living.
The writer’s life is never boring.
Upside: That is certainly true.
Carol Mason is the best-selling author of The Love Market, Send Me A Lover and The Secrets of Married Women – all recently re-released as Amazon E books for $2.99. For the month of March, Carol will be donating 50% of the proceeds of her E book sales to breast cancer. See her website, www.carolmasonbooks.com for more details, or jump right onto Amazon and buy the books.
March 1, 2012
