Failing or Balance: You Get to Decide

This post came up on my LinkedIn last week and I just had to share it. Although ironic that this post about writing popped up right after publishing my first book that is not why I am posting this. I am posting this because it’s the story of all our lives: feeling like we are failing because we feel we are not doing enough of what other people decide is enough. It’s about the should’s, ought to’s and remembering how they get in the way. At it’s essence this story is about finding your humanity! You get decide who you are, what you do, when you do it and whether or not it’s the right thing for you. Read on! 🙂

Written by Michelle Richmond
Author. Publisher of Fiction Attic Press and San Francisco Journal of Books. Editor.
A Writer’s Confession (Why I Don’t Write Every Day)
June 17, 2014

Recently, during a fundraising event at a Bay Area library, one of the organizers asked me, “Do you write every day?”
“I haven’t written in months,” I blurted. I was a little surprised that the words had come out of my mouth. Although I often think them, I rarely put it so bluntly at events to which I am appearing in the role of The Writer Who Writes.
The organizer looked surprised. “Writers always say to write every day,” she said.

The truth is, during the months immediately before and after a book release, I rarely manage to make the time to work on a novel. I may write blog posts to promote the book, an essay here and there (the byline being a good way to alert folks that you have a new book out), literary playlists, interviews, and all manner of marketing material, but the kind of writing I enjoy the most—fiction—falls by the wayside.

Following the publication earlier this year of Golden State and Hum, I’ve done dozens of events. I love meeting readers and am indebted to the booksellers who host me and put my books in readers’ hands. The downside, however, is that book promotion is time-consuming and expensive. The time spent promoting, combined with the peripheral jobs one takes on to finance a book tour, mean less time writing. And so forth.

There are so many ways for us to feel that we are failing, so many ways to castigate ourselves for not living up to our full potential. Whenever I feel guilty about all the writing I’m not doing, I remind myself of one thing: I will never regret the hours spent in my kid’s classroom, or cheering his Little League game, or watching a movie on the couch with my husband, instead of writing. And while I prefer writing to book promotion, promotion is a necessary privilege: necessary to sustain my ability to earn an income as a writer, and a privilege because the events mean that someone is listening.

As long as I’m lucid, I imagine, I’ll be writing in some form or another. We writers are fortunate, because unlike models and pure mathematicians, lumberjacks and whitewater guides and basketball players, our ability to do what we do does not diminish with age. Far from it. The more we read, the more we write, the more we live—the better our writing is likely to get.

So let this confession serve as one of the following: 

• a pat on the back if you do write every day (because you are probably a fairly rare species)
• a word of comfort and commiseration if you rarely seem to be able to find the time
• I may not write every day, but I do write. I go months without working on my novel at all, and then I’ll have a period of weeks during which I write furiously, getting down all the stuff that’s been brewing in my head, all the stuff I haven’t had time to transfer onto the page. Last year I went to a hotel on the Mendocino coast for one weekend and wrote 50 pages, which was more than I’d written in the three months prior. And here’s the thing: that has worked for me.
• I am a writer, and yet most of the days of my life have not been spent writing. They have been spent teaching, and editing, and giving readings, and responding to email, and vacuuming, and navigating health insurance, and getting the smog check, and calling the plumber, and making the salad, and organizing the playdates, and paying the bills, and chaperoning the field trips, and going for walks, and all the small ministrations of love and necessity that constitute parenthood and spouse-hood and friendship and simply being a person alive in the world.I am a writer.
• Most of my days have not been spent writing. But some have. And that has amounted to something.

When you feel guilty about not writing as much as you “ought” to, remember this: the days that you do spend writing will amount to something. As for all of those days you don’t spend writing? They amount to something too: a life. And that, in the end, is better than any book you’ll ever write.

Featured on: Productivity
Posted by:Michelle Richmond

Happy start to your week!

Dr. Michelle

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