I had really hoped that our two week trip to Maine wouldn’t prove too much of an interruption. I thought I would write more. I was wrong. We rolled back into WV last night and I am back in my dedicated writing space today. It’s a 10×10 shed that I wired, insulated and paneled. We call it the man shack. That’s a horrible name, but, alas, it has stuck.
Today I’m back at the writing and it feels good. I’ve missed the routine, the story. I definitely had some crises of confidence while on the road, but that always seems to go hand in hand with not writing. I get why people stop writing. I get why people never start. I get why people get mired in the middle of their work and give up.
A little Google search on “giving up writing” yields plenty of blog posts like this one or this one. Here is a quote from Joyce Carol Oates that sums it up pretty well:
I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes . . . and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.
(“Joyce Carol Oates” in George Plimpton, ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1989)
Amen. Off to write.