I was never a regular watcher of “Sex and the City”. Quite possibly I didn’t see my first episode until it was about off the air. I have this habit of waiting for popular shows to migrate down to lesser known stations which run them in marathons. I hate to admit it, but I didn’t get into NCIS until after USA started running marathons of it.
One thing I did notice was the Carrie character had the crutch of most writers, nicotine. At some point in the series the anti-smoking crowd raised a brew-ha-ha about it and the writers decided to make her quit.
The real problem is that people view nicotine as a crutch. It’s not. It is what keeps us at the keyboard, or at paper with pen. Yes, from time to time a story or book will be so compelling in our heads that we will be at a keyboard 14 hours straight without realizing it, but those stories and times are rare. I read about such things in writing magazines, but the same authors later talk about writers block and long periods away from the craft and going insane with the absence.
How to put this so the outside looking in can understand.
Most writers have a day job. Any writer publishing bound works needs to have a blog or website which gets at least 4000 unique hits every month in order to ensure the first 1000 copies of whatever they print flies out the door. They also need that many hits so any advertising they allow on their site generates a tiny stream of revenue…by stream, I mean enough for a Wendy’s combo order at the drive up, not enough for a mortgage payment.
One needs to have something they really enjoy to keep them in front of a keyboard for the amount of time it takes to write all of that. Let alone the amount of time it takes to re-write all of that if you are sending it through outside editing. For some writers it is nicotine and others it is booze. For Papa Hemingway it was both. The simple truth is that most of us took up writing because it allows us to spend more time with our vices.
Yes, you can point to hundreds of interviews with writers which say they get up early and write for 2 hours before everyone wakes, then block out a couple of hours on the weekend. If you want to put out one novel every 12 years and pay people to write a blog for you, then you can do that.
I don’t suppose many of you paid attention during the “60 Minutes” interview with JK Rowling where she quipped to her husband that she really needed a cigarette. I’ve often thought the Harry Potter series ended because she gave up smoking. The simple truth: when a shark stops swimming it dies. When a writer gives up their vices their writing suffers.
Seriously, how long can you sit in front of a keyboard pulling thoughts from the deepest regions of your mind? I will wager it is much like driving. There is a reason most safety experts say drivers need to get out of a vehicle at least every 2 hours. Because that is about how long you can remain well focused on what you are doing.
When we are partaking of our favorite vice in front of the keyboard the uninitiated say we are using a crutch. The simple truth is we set the time aside to spend it with our vice. Those thoughts which find their way from our minds to the word processor are the same thoughts we always have communing with our vice, but this time we write them down.
Some of you may have noticed quite a few movie reviews being posted here lately. Quite simply I gave up nicotine after experiencing a lot of nagging that coincided with the flu. I haven’t felt compelled to write much. I watched the entire Torchwood series and many more movies I didn’t bother to review they were so bad. Thankfully I was down to final editing of “John Smith – Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars”. You should be able to get it before the end of this quarter.
