So I’ve been thinking about excuses lately, those excuses
that writers create (in lieu of books) that prevent them from producing work (“I’m
just not young anymore”), and those excuses anyone anywhere makes in any field,
preventing dreams from being realized and work from being accomplished, be it
painting your house, building a boat, working on a relationship, finding the
dream job. As a writer, I’ve struggled with the interruptions of life and
writing has always been the first activity to go when something else demands my
time. But if I take this calling seriously, I need to be single-minded about writing
and push away the distractions, within reason.
As I read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying for my residency, I stumbled upon a little,
fascinating editor’s note about the author in the back of the book. This Nobel
Prize winning author wrote his novel at the University of Mississippi power
plant where he was employed as a fireman and night watchman. He wrote the book “mostly
in the early morning, after everybody had gone to bed and power needs had
diminished.” I’ve worked jobs like that one, putting myself through college by
working the graveyard shift at an answering service where I monitored phones
for doctors’ offices and AAA. And as I young mother I worked often until 2 a.m.
at a television station as a master control engineer. Both jobs provided me
hours to accomplish things that a 9 to 5 job prohibited. I studied for all my college
classes at that answering service and earned a Bachelor’s degree doing it.
I miss that kind of job. (Ssshhhh, don’t tell my boss.) But
I now realize that no job in the world should prevent us from writing if we feel
passionate about the task. Recently I came across a quote from the memoir of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which served as a clarion call for me to silence the
excuses and the complaints about not having just the right circumstances, needed
time, or perfect place to write:
“In retrospect, almost
all my life since the day I was first arrested had been the same: just for that
particular week, that month, that season, that year, there had always been some
reason for not writing—it was inconvenient or dangerous or I was too
busy—always some need to postpone it. If I had given in to common sense, once,
twice, ten times, my achievement as a writer would have been incomparably
smaller. But I had gone on writing—as a bricklayer, in overcrowded prison huts,
in transit jails without so much as a pencil, when I was dying of cancer, in an
exile’s hovel after a double teaching shift. I had let nothing—dangers,
hindrances, the need for rest—interrupt my writing, and only because of that
could I say at fifty-five that I now had no more than twenty years of work to
get through, and had put the rest behind me.”
I'm silenced. How can I possibly make any excuses that compare? I wish I heard that call a long, long time ago and managed
to ignore the manufactured reasons in my head for doing everything BUT writing.
