Addicted to Writing

Addicted to Writing

This Christmas holiday we’ve been lucky enough to have everyone in the family come home. We’ve been eating together, going for walks, watching TV, and playing games. We all arranged to have time off from work so that we could spend time together.

When I worked as a veterinarian, time off wasn’t that simple. There were days I didn’t go into the office, but even on those occasions, I was on call. Any hour of the night or day I could be summoned to see a horse with a cut or a cow having trouble delivering a calf. The cows and horses had no respect for my idea of a holiday.

When I changed professions from veterinarian to writer, I thought the problems of time off over the holidays would be over. As a writer, I’m my own boss and I work whenever I want.

But it’s not that simple. Almost everything you can read about writing suggests that a serious writer should put something down every day. A quick look at the habits of famous writers suggests that this seems to be the norm.

Stephen King is notorious for how much he writes. He isn’t happy unless he puts out six pages every day. Alice Munro said “I write every morning, seven days a week and Leo Tolstoy said “I must write each day without fail.”

I consider myself a full-time writer, but I don’t write every day. I was encouraged by the diaries of John Steinbeck. Every day that he wrote he commented on his writing in his journals and usually there were no entries on weekends.

My own practice is to write five days a week. I get up early each weekday, run for ten kilometers and then try to write for the rest of the morning. When I’m working on a novel or a short story my goal is to get 1,500 words down. If I’m editing, I work until I feel that I’m not seeing my writing with fresh eyes. Editing requires carefully critical attention to the words you are reviewing and once you nonchalantly pass over a sentence, it’s time for a rest or a change of activity.

I like the advice of Pulitzer Prize Winner, Bernard Malamud. He said “You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place – you suit yourself, your nature…Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way.

For me, writing every day is too much like an obsession or even addiction. There are writers who say you can only be a successful author if you are obsessed with your work. To some degree we must be consumed by our work in order to write, but I like to think that I can combine my love of writing with a somewhat normal existence.

When my family comes for holidays, I put away the computer. It’s the start of a slippery slope to say I can write when everyone else is busy with something else. It would be easy to excuse myself from family morning walks or talks in the evening to get a little time in writing.

Like all kinds of activities, writing can become an addiction. It may be hard to decide what level of devotion to the craft is pathological. It’s simple for us to see problems in others with their particular interests. Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, TV or the internet, it’s always easy to get too much of a bad thing or even a good thing. While it might be simple to diagnose addiction in the uncle who drinks too much or the nephew who never lifts his nose from a cell phone, writers may never see the problems lurking behind their own obsessive habits.