The Write Stuff

There's a romantic notion about fiction writing that I'm going to dispel.

Fiction writing is not rose petals, bubble baths, Dom Perignon and tropical breezes. It is more dandelions, cold showers, Boone's Farm and Midwestern wind slaps.

Fiction writers, it seems to me, are, by definition, escapists. They possess the ability to put themselves and, in turn, their readers, in a different place or time. Perhaps that's why readers have false impressions of the writer's life. They wrongly assume that the writer must have lived that life in order to have written about it.

There are, of course, writers who do lead interesting lives and are able to write about it. But most of those are called non-fiction writers or travel writers.

I started thinking about the romantic notion of the fiction writer's life late last night as I was weeding through my first novel, Lost in the Ivy, for the final time. There I was, moments away from sending off a story seven years in the making, and the last thing I did before giving it up for good to the printers was pick out inverted apostrophes and double-hyphens.

It was then that I realized that fiction writing is oftentimes a tedious, laborious process -- one that we often take to bed with us, leading to many a sleepless night. That's not even getting into the cumbersome hours upon hours invested in the selling of a manuscript and the piles upon piles of rejections. And then if you do sell it, there's the hours upon hours and dollars upon dollars invested in marketing it -- just to sell a few copies. Insert a sigh here.

Why then do we do it? Why do we voluntarily put ourselves through this writer's wringer, squeezing away all of that precious time that could be spent doing something else? Certainly we're not doing it for the wealth and fame. There are thousands of fiction writers and only a handful of them have achieved any true riches or notoriety.

We do it because there's nothing else we'd want to do more. We write because it's in our blood. It's our passion. It's our love. It's who we are.

There are rewards. There's adventure and travel to exotic places, without ever having to leave your home. And there's always the thrill and excitement that comes with actually seeing your words in print.

But the rewards are few and far between and you have to work incredibly hard to obtain them. It seems to me that these rewards are really just icing on the cake. They are something to reach for during those tough times, when the writing itself becomes laborious. Over the long haul, it's that love of writing that sustains us.

Okay, so maybe I didn't dispel that romantic notion at all.