Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Oh, the Writer's Life for Me!

Some folk who find out that I make a living as a writing (without realizing that I am a kept man) are curious as to what the life of a writer looks like. Donald Miller, in Blue Like Jazz, captured the essence of the writer’s life rather perfectly, so I will let him explain.

“Writers don’t make any money at all. We make about a dollar. But then again we don’t work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck’s book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man’s stupid words. And for this, as I said before, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.”

Just my thoughts,

Sean

2 comments:

Chris Hansen said...

wow -- it's like this every day in my mind... scary....

Sarah said...

Having just completed a bout of several months duration of that sort of behavior... Yes! That is us, the writers of the world.

(This week, I'm happily buzzing with a project that is moving forward nicely. Good thing too, since I've gotten two setbacks on other writing fronts in the last 2 weeks. I keep reminding myself, "It's all in God's hands. Well, yeah, I have to do the work, but the results are in God's hands."