The driven and the…not so driven

Barbara Kingsolver gets up at 4am to pen her bestsellers. J.K.Rowling wrote hers while juggling a takeaway coffee and an infant. Countless aspiring writers set themselves targets of 2000 – or 10000 – words a day, and join NaNoWriMo to prove it.

But insofar as I can call myself a Real Writer (and that’s a whole other discussion) I find that life beckons. Sometimes it does more than that – it screeches HAROLD!!! HAROLD!!!

I find myself thinking, is there any more intrinsic value in writing than in, say, lying in the sun listening to the birds? Is it really so important to get out of bed right now? Don’t my children need me more than my readers do? I happen to live on acreage, so there’s things to be sprayed, netted, fenced, chopped…. And of course, there’s Facebook (though that’ s not a huge temptation – does anyone else find FB…yawn…really boring?).

For me, it all hinges on whether I’ve got anything to say. To paraphrase what everyone’s mum told them, “When you haven’t got anything meaningful to say, shut the fuck up!’ And yet….and yet…