Taking my own Advice

I teach writing and urge people to write every day, yet I never follow that advice myself. I write sporadically and periodically but not daily. I read an article on changing habits and found myself nodding in agreement over all of the steps I should take to write every day, as a habit, but I have not taken that advice either. I don't think that I am a lazy person, but I am not an overly ambitious one. I sometimes wish that more ambition would find its way into my psyche. That I will become an ambitious goal-setter and do all of the things that I envision myself doing; that I will conquer my bad habits and replace them with good ones (I almost wrote healthy in place of good, but that would signal a topic change into the area of bodily health which I do not want to talk about now); that I will wake up and follow my plan for the day and see the end product in my mind while I achieve the small steps necessary to arrive at the destination, the goal. These things are not in me every day, though, and I muddle through my lists and days and weeks and months and then Wow! I'm another year older.

I teach writing and focus on process and how it all comes together into one huge life-changing revelation, but that is not what happens. I need to heed the words of writers past when they suggest that all that writing is is work and daily work if anything is going to ever come of it. I have to sit down and write every day or not. If not, then maybe I am not that writer I think I am. If so, then maybe something extraordinary will come of it, say a collection of poetry or short stories or maybe a novel or book of essays. Writing is a process, but the end-products are the only measures of what we have done. I have two poems published to show for four decades of writing. My craft is not perfected because it is not a daily habit. Changing habits is hard.

When I was a teenager, I thought that I should have to suffer for my craft. I should live in poverty or in fear of my life for a period of time, or I should struggle to live by my wits alone away from people. I should travel, but in a way in which I will need to work hard to survive. I have never done this, and I am still not the writer I envisioned nor do I have the writing life that I want. I continually refer to my next life as if I am so sure that there will be one where I will have another chance to become the writer I want to become (and here invites the "just do its" and the "go for its" which do not work on me). Or I may return as a giant millipede.