Sunday, February 2, 2014

WRITE


Marion Aldridge

Write!

Write. Whatever it takes to write, do it. Turn off the television set. Get up early. Go to a coffee shop. Don’t go to a coffee shop. Set aside the time. Take the time. Steal the time. Write.

In a yoga class this week, I had a flush of “retirement guilt” as I listened to young moms talk about how hard it is to create space in their lives to come to a yoga class. During my first year of retirement, I have been blessed with lots of free time and choices. So, I felt a bit defensive about my abundance of free time. Then I remembered that I worked my butt off for 45 years at “real jobs” and made time to be a husband, a parent, a good employee, a friend, a sports fan and a writer. J. K. Rowling did way better than I did.

Write.

Whatever the subject, write. You can delete it or throw it away later. I wrote an entire book that turned out to be pretty awful. Now I know how not to write about that subject.

Write, even if it’s bad. You will have second and third and twentieth draft opportunities. It won’t be perfect on the first draft or the fifth draft. You can research later. You can get opinions from proofreaders and copy-editors later. Just write.

I would like to be a better writer, but people who don’t write aren’t even bad writers. They are simply not writers.

I would like to be a more consistent writer, but I’d rather be an erratic author than a wisher or an if-onlier or a wannabe.

I would like to be a smarter or more clever pundit, but I don’t think the Nobel or Pulitzer prizes are in my future. I would simply like to get some ideas out there for conversation and to receive an occasional check in the mail.


So, I write. 

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