What Writing Looks Like
There’s a romance to the idea of writing.
When you tell someone you are a writer, they are often all like “ooohhh whoa soooo cool!”
Why is that?
Well it’s pretty much because READING is awesome. It’s hellaciously awesome, the single best thing in the wide world to do with any amount of time you have on your hands. As some have called it: perfectly legal hallucinations!
But writing? Yeah, that has got to happen, and it has got to be good for the READING part to be worthwhile.
And despite the fact that nearly all literate humans are “capable of writing,” that does not make them a “writer. Why?
Because writing is not pretty.
It’s hunched.
It’s often done by balding men with beer bellies or
unsexy women with streaks of gray in their hair.
It is a very still sort of practice.
(There will probably never be Fantasy Novel Writing, though wouldn’t that be totes amaze-balls?)
What the hell is happening in this room right now
Here at the Writer’s Room in NYC, there are a BUNCH of writers currently working. It is almost dead silent (no, they would not let me use my typewriter, harrummph).
Stories are exploding all the hell over the place in this room and this is what it looks like.
Well, to get a more detailed feel for it, here’s a feel things happening right now:
- typing
- coughing
- sighing
- squinting
- backspacing
- leaning on one’s hand whilst pondering
- Facebook break
- Coffee drinking
- head scratching
- texting of the spouse to answer babysitter questions.
- cutting and pasting
- more backspacing
- music playlist adjustments
- spinning around in spinny chairs.
- staring out the window
- nose picking
- Instagram photos of the laptop
The shared life of the mind is a lot of work. Too bad we can’t just press our foreheads together in order to share our totes awesome-sauce stories we are dreaming up at the moment. Maybe that will be the reality some day.
Meanwhile, I have to go. I havne’t Instagrammed a pic of this post yet.
