What Really Keeps Me From Writing

Life must be lived at one speed.

But Sheri and I have noticed many try to speed it up. Maybe they simply don’t realize they’re doing it and the result is they push out peace and make those around them play at their speed.

Others want it to slow down. And some people wish they could stop it all together or even reverse it. Maybe we’ve all wished that at some point. But if we try to control the speed of the lives we live, it will bring us all kinds of trouble, sicknesses, even disease and death.

Changing the speed makes it something else besides true life.

And yet writers are all speed-shifters who trade living fuller lives for the chance to play with the controls. And we do this compulsively as a way to see more.

The biggest reason I don’t write, even when I want to, is not that I’m scared or disinterested or any of the easier things I might wish it to be. No, it’s because I know I’ve not lived enough yet to write what I want; I’m not full of enough real life lived at its real speed to write effectively about my subject. I need to discuss the issues and think deeply about my vision, the questions and considerations, the real research with others.

I need to live more.

Being a writer is being a watcher is being a liver of life. I might say I must write in order to live, but it’s more true that I need to live in order to write–get critiqued and be stretched, and be disciplined by the competing ideas of community. I must grow.

This is what books do. Why would I think writing them would be any different? This is what books take. It is what we writers take as well. Writing and life must happen in concert.

“I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.” –Frances Hodgson Burnett