I’m writing this blog post minutes after dragging myself out of bed, where I hit the snooze alarm twice. I can see pink in the sky out the window over my writing desk. The birds are singing. The tea kettle is on, and it can’t heat up fast enough. I am exhausted, but the only way to get through this moment is to write.
For the last month, I’ve been up early every morning, no excuses, to work on my novel. Lately, as I sink down at the desk, I find myself thinking about something I wrote recently for Poets & Writers. The essay, “Tell Me I’m Good: The Writer’s Quest for Reassurance,” examines how praise affects writers. It includes this line about the writing process and its potential rewards: “The difficult answer is yes, you really can do that work and not receive the kind of payoff you probably dream about—literary agents, book deals, starred Kirkus reviews.”
I have to force myself not to think of potential payoffs as I revise this novel. As I wrote in that essay, “. . . the publishing industry offers no shortcuts or guarantees. The only variable a writer can control is how hard she works.”
Which I why I’m here, at my writing desk, still half-caught in a dream I had last night about a group of anxious writers. They didn’t have enough time to write, or they wasted the time they did have, or they were too paralyzed by the fear of failure to put actual words down on the page. It was a dream about all of us, really. It reminds me of the advice I recently gave a writer online, someone who struggled to write regularly. I told her that writing is work, and you have to sit down and do that work even if you don’t feel like it, even if you’re not inspired, and even if you are afraid of failing. It’s the only way anyone ever gets any writing done.
The sky is turning from pink to orange. The birds are still singing. I step away to make a pot of tea and return to see my computer glowing in the dim room, the paragraphs I’d just written running across its screen. New words, fresh as dew.
I sit. I pour my tea. I open the latest draft of my novel. I’ve blogged before about early morning writing sessions, about not getting enough sleep, about having to pull myself from bed to get to work. But I don’t think I’ve clarified how much I love it. These quiet morning hours when it’s just the writing and nothing else, when my mind is still half a breath away from sleep—this is my payoff.
This, right here, is everything.