Writing is a Harsh Mistress

Does your writing ever interfere with your family life? Do the demands of your fiction ever create friction with those closest to you?

by Paul D. Marks

The title of this piece, Writing is a Harsh Mistress, pretty much answers the question. Yes, writing interferes with family life. It interferes with daily life. The demands of my fiction definitely create friction with the reality of my life and sometimes those close to me.

Jack Kerouac and his scroll.

Most people don’t understand both the demands of the writing and the need and desire to write, which is akin to a heroin habit. You must have your fix. And one fix leads to another. And one high demands another. If you have some success, you want more. You want to taste it again.

And there’s always something more to write, something else to write. A great idea for a new story or a terrific bit for that scene you’ve been stuck on.

To be honest, writing is like a black hole. It sucks you in and it’s sometimes hard to see the light outside that hole. And if I could be fed intravenously and not have to sleep I might never get up from my writing chair. I do, however, get up several times in a session to take the dogs out, walk them, play with them, etc. It’s good for them and makes them happy and it’s good for me, too, to get out of the chair. And if I was glued to the chair and the screen, Pepper, when she was younger, would come up and nudge my elbow: time for a walk, daddy. And I would always oblige. She doesn’t do that much anymore, but Buster has kind of taken over those duties. He doesn’t nudge my elbow like she did, but he’ll come and stand and glare at me with those “puppy dog” eyes, telling me it’s time to get moving. (On a side note, it always amazes me that even though dogs can’t talk they sure can communicate to us.)

The result of Pepper getting me up to go for a walk.

When I was working on a typewriter (remember those?) I would often wish that there could be an endless supply of paper (like Jack Kerouac writing on the “endless” scroll for On the Road) so that I wouldn’t have to change paper at the end of every page, because I’d often lose my train of thought in doing that. So when computers came out with their “endless pages” it was a miracle to me. But the downside of that is that I truly can sit here for hours and never get up, never take a break.

Often, friends and family don’t understand the driving need to write, to express ourselves, and that can cause friction. Also in the past, particularly before I had any kind of success and was hungry and desperate, I would sometimes turn down friends who wanted to get together for a movie or dinner since I wanted to write. I wanted to be successful, so I sacrificed other things to that desire. I know that in at least a couple of cases I lost those friendships because of that.

The guitar I don't have time to play.

Other things suffer as well, sometimes doing the dishes or dusting. Well, let them suffer. But what else suffers is that I don’t have much, and often no, time to play guitar. Hobbies suffer: I collect things, toys, Beatles stuff, movie stuff, other things, and I have little to no time to “play” with any of that. A lot is sacrificed to The Writing.

One of my Beatles collectibles.

But I am very lucky to have Amy, my wife, who both understands my need to write and also helps me with it. She’s a damn good editor. And she’s pretty tolerant of my writing mistress. Which is not to say there aren’t times when she wants me to quit for the day or do something else on a particular day. But in the big picture she’s very understanding.

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And Happy Belated Thanksgiving to everyone. I hope you had a good one!

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

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