Natalie Weiss

The writer’s life sounds much more romantic than it is.

We’re told the writer’s life looks like this: You wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that won’t let you go. You slip out of bed at 3 am and pour yourself a cup of coffee (or maybe even a glass of whiskey) and you sit down at your desk – some sort of antique, rugged masterpiece in and of itself with a brilliantly comfy leather chair, a small reading lamp illuminating the steam billowing off your cup (or glaring off the ice in your glass), and you write. And you write and you write and you write. Because this idea won’t let you go. It will never let you go until, thousands and thousands of words and cups and cups and glasses and glasses (somehow spaced out just enough so as to render you sober enough to write, yet intoxicated enough to create) later, you type “The End.” And the idea, from the start, was brilliant. It is so brilliant, and you are such a writer that from the moment you typed that first word, the story was masterful. If you edit, if you revise, it is only to strengthen an already remarkable work.

This is the writer’s life. Right?

My writer friends will know that this is about as far from the truth as you can get.

This is my writer’s life: My cat wakes me up at some absurd hour, like 3 am, pawing me in the face. I kick him out of my room and go back to sleep. I have jumbled dreams and nightmares that I remember vaguely when I wake a few hours later. I make a 4-cup pot of coffee, fill a mug, and head to my desk. I’m in my PJs: sweats and a hoodie, the hood pulled up because my desk happens to be in a drafty corner of my apartment. My coffee chills quickly because of this too. As do my fingers. Maybe one day I’ll move my desk. And I’ll get a new one. I’d like one that’s a bit bigger, one that will actually hold my monitor and my laptop and my light, so I’ll no longer have to use the cat tower for extra space. I pull up my manuscript. I’ve been working on it for almost a year now. And there were years before that that brought me here – to this idea. The first idea I’ve had that I’ve seen through. I’ve seen it through a rough (rough) draft and at least three other drafts. I haven’t done a good job of keeping track. And it’s still not done. I don’t know if I will ever deem it “done.” I am sure there will always be something that I’ll see as a flaw or that I’ll think I could’ve written better. Writing, after all, is subjective. Even my own mind sees things differently on different days. Some days, certain scenes or lines I’ve written give me chills, bring me to tears. Other days, those same scenes and lines sound like garbage, and I’m ready to throw everything away. Writing, then, only really happens on the days when I’m somewhere in between – when I’m neither hypercritical nor messianic.

I pick at my fingers. I check my phone. I sing to the cat (yes, I actually do this).

I stall. I write. I stall. I write.

I chastise myself for not being more focused. For not getting enough work done, even though I’m not exactly sure what enough work is. It’s all a process, anyways. Stories demand a certain person, a certain writer, and I may not be that person or that writer yet, the one my story demands. But I’m working towards that person, that writer, every day.

I do all my work in the mornings – usually three to four hours of fractured work and thought and playing with the cat and wondering and wandering. Lately, I’ve been wishing I could work at night. I used to always write at night, back when I lived with my parents and worked at the grocery store. My schedule at the store varied, and – I don’t know – it was easier to wander off to my room and type these stories, so often explorations of identity that my parents would never understand, at night than to think about doing it in the morning.

So these days, I think about writing in the evening. I think about making a cup of tea; I’d rather have a glass of beer, probably a crisp lager or a smooth porter, but I’m in the middle of dry January. And I’ve yet to get into whiskey – at least the stuff I think of when I think of writers of old sitting down with a drink. Don’t judge me when I say I still prefer Fireball over any other liquor. I think about tea – and I pine for beer – and then evening comes, and I’m tired, and I don’t feel like the writer my story demands. So I don’t write.

I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with ideas I can’t contain.

But I have ideas I can’t contain. They drizzle out of me slowly and so seldom break my dams of self-doubt and uncontrolled thought, so seldom flood these pages. The words splash up and over the dams though.

They endure.

I write.

And I write.

And I write.

Morning after morning, cup of coffee after cup of coffee, fractured hour after fractured hour, I write. And the words string together to create a story. One that I’ll revise and revise and revise until one day I’ll reach The End, and I’ll know there is little else I can do for it on my own. And I’ll pass it on and hope it’s enough.

And while I hope, I’ll write.

And write.

And write.

And endure.