The Plight of a Writer
When I first started writing I didn’t understand the plight of a writer. I thought it was just me. Writer’s block. Hell ya. Who do you think you are writing? Nobody wants to read your shit. Writers have one thing in common. They don’t write. Many of us give up before we let that happen. Before we even start we’ve packed it in. Martha Graham wrote “we are never satisfied with our work. Creative work is a queer divine dissatisfaction that keeps us marching and more alive than the others.” This speaks right to me. There is no satisfaction at anytime even after you’ve arrived and I’m strangely comforted by this. Anne Lamott teaches us to write short assignments shitty first drafts and look through 1 inch picture frames. We do that for awhile and it seems to settle us down a bit until the next storm hits. “How’s the writing” someone says so innocently. I hesitate to call myself a writer because i...