Remembering The Writing

Sometimes I forget about the writing. Or, I should say: sometimes I'm so caught up in being an author, that I forget about being a writer.

Being an author is cool. It's also strange. You do things like answer a lot of emails, and plan events, and look at covers. You talk about schedules and deadlines and money. There are a lot of people involved. It's kind of what I imagine being a celebrity is like except when you're an author no one cares what you look like, or who you're dating. You also don't go on cool tropical vacations where people photograph you.

But you are at the center of something.

You write this book alone, and then slowly, or all at once, people start becoming a part of it. An agent, an editor. A publicist. Sometimes other agents, foreign teams. There is marketing and sales and then reviewers and bloggers. It slips from your hands out into the world and you don't get it back.

Do you want it back? Not really, no. This was the point all along. But somehow, even still, that offers little solace.

What offers solace is simple: writing. It's the putting words on the page, the doing the thing, that is what really matters. Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird says the following: "Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is."

It's true, it is. Sometimes I forget that. Sometimes I get so lost in the emails and questions and the five-year plan that I forget it's really all about the writing. That I love it more than I love anything else. That it is the best gift I have ever been given in this life. Better than a book deal. Better than the book on the shelf.

That's when I pick up Bird by Bird or On Writing and I let them remind me. Sometimes we need other authors to remind us that we are really writers.

XO,

R