It can be crazy-making, this writing thing. Every day you open a vein and pour your blood onto the page. Some days the blood flows, other days it dries up in an ugly clot before it comes anywhere near your page. And then some days it feels like you’ll never be able to stop the flow and they’ll find you dead on the floor, drained by the very page that was meant to make you feel whole again.
Every day you ask yourself “Is this working? Am I digging deep enough? Am I telling my whole truth or glossing over the details that will make me look like a fool? Am I wasting my precious time for nothing? Am I fooling myself?”
The ugly gremlins want to choke you nearly every day with their resistance. “Look how well so-an-so can write. You’ll never be as good as her. Maybe you should quit and go back to writing press releases. And besides, this story isn’t worth telling. It’s horse shit and you’re delusional for thinking otherwise. You’ll never amount to anything as a writer. Haven’t you noticed? Hardly anyone shows up at your blog – it’s because you’re boring them with this crap. All the GOOD writers have thousands of readers and you… well, you’re not one of them.”
And yet you write. You just keep showing up at the page day after day and you write. Because it’s the only thing you know how to do. Because you have to. Because it feels like breathing, this writing thing – it always has. As natural and life-giving and just as desperately necessary as breathing. Try to stop it and you know you’ll soon be gasping for life like a dying lung cancer patient.
Something on that blank page beckons you back to it every single day. And so you write. Critics and gremlims and prophets of doom be damned.
Writing is what you must do. Writing is your therapy, your salvation, your peace of mind. Writing is your drug, your life-force, and – when you can bare to offer it up – your paltry gift to the world.
You are, after all, a writer and you will write. Even if the only eyes that peruse that page are your own.