What Does it Mean To Live a Writing Life?

I’m not sure that being a writer or living a writer’s life are necessarily the same thing. We can be writers without pining for a writer’s life. And please note that while I’m talking about writing, you can fill in the blank with any artistic endeavor.

I should begin by saying what I think a writer’s life isn’t. A writer’s life doesn’t mean you have to write all day. It doesn’t mean you have to write every day. It certainly doesn’t mean you have to make your living writing.

So what, then, is a writer’s life?

A writer’s life is making a commitment to putting words on paper, whether by hand or on a keyboard. It means staying in close contact with the storyteller inside you.

It means being attuned to the inspiration all around you. It means rediscovering your inner child—the one who loved to play make-believe, dress in costumes, and create new worlds under homemade tents. It means remembering the activities you loved when you were younger and probably still do deep down somewhere.

We Should Admit to Our Love of Language

A writer’s life is born from a love of words, first words in other people’s stories and later our own words in our own stories.

For some of us, writing is our calling, so living a writer’s life means discovering that calling and staying true to it despite the myriad of challenges. A writer’s life means being creative, sharing the truest part of yourself, and letting your soul roam free. For many of us, myself included, writing is a way to say things we can’t say any other way.

Really what I’m talking about is authentic living, which means living in a way that’s true to who you are deep down inside. If you’re a writer, it means living in a way that honors the writer in you.

The Writing Life Includes Authentic Living

There’s a wonderful post about authentic living on postivepsychology.com. Here’s some of what they say about engaging in authentic living:

“Listen to your inner voice rather than losing it in the noise of others’. Make it an ongoing process to listen to your hopes, dreams, and fears.

Know yourself, what you are good at, what you are prepared to do, and what you are not. Face up to the truths of who you are. Honesty is not always pleasant, but it has the potential to free you.

Own yourself and your truths. Don’t let others push you into their way of thinking, but also don’t stick to views when you are proved wrong or they no longer work for you. Take responsibility for your choices.

Be yourself; be honest and transparent in your dealings. People like and are drawn to those they perceive as sincere and genuine and distrust those who are not.”

Easier said than done, right? Living an authentic life is a challenge, yes, but it’s one I’m ready for.

Choosing to Live the Writing Life

I’ve always been a writer. Check that. I’ve always been a reader. I first thought of myself as a writer in the sixth grade (age 11) when I was asked to write our class graduation play. I don’t think I was asked because the teacher thought I was such a good writer; I’m sure it had more to do with my neat handwriting. But from that day on, I’ve thought of myself as a writer.

Even though I’ve thought of myself as a writer for more than 40 years, I haven’t always pursued a writer’s life. As much as my initial yearning to write felt like a calling, over the years it became a chore, something I did because I thought I had to or I would cease to exist.

In moments of contemplation brought on by COVID and other ordeals, I realized that I had lost the joy of writing. I had forgotten how much fun it is to write a story for the story’s sake. I mourned the loss of that joy and I wondered how I could get it back. Because, really, what is the point of writing if you don’t enjoy it? I wrote this post about how I had nearly given up writing for good.

Reclaiming the Joy of Writing

If you’ve read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg then you’re familiar with the concept of Beginner’s Mind. Here’s a wonderful definition of Beginner’s Mind from Leo Babauta from Zen Habits:

“It’s dropping our expectations and preconceived ideas about something, and seeing things with an open mind, fresh eyes, just like a beginner. If you’ve ever learned something new, you can remember what that’s like: you’re probably confused, because you don’t know how to do whatever you’re learning, but you’re also looking at everything as if it’s brand new, perhaps with curiosity and wonder.”

That’s it exactly. I had lost my curiosity and wonder about writing.

One of the ways I’ve been dealing with my lost curiosity and wonder is by consciously pursuing a writer’s life. A writer’s life takes work, though. It requires persistence. I have to take time every day to look for things that bring me joy, including writing.

It means practicing gratitude, which I’ve been particularly terrible at lately. The myriad of problems we’re dealing with, while not unprecedented in history, are unprecedented to us. As humans, we have an innate fear of the unknown, and we’ve been living in a constant state of unknowns for two years.

These days I’ve settled into the acceptance that things are in constant flux and they will be for some time. That concession has opened enough headspace that I could begin looking honestly at my writing and my life and I wasn’t entirely happy with what I saw.

I Can Control How I React To the World Around Me

Something had to give, and the easiest thing for me to change was my outlook. I made the decision to live deliberately. As Thoreau said,

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”

For me, living deliberately includes making a special place in my heart for writing. Not writing because I have to. Because I want to. Because it is an authentic part of who I am. It brings me joy. And yes, that includes the physical act of writing—sitting my bottom into the chair and dancing my fingers across the keyboard, typing out words that become sentences that become stories.

When everything else in my life fails me, even in the depth of the darkest days of a pandemic we are not yet through, writing saves me. Even the healing that has come from writing this post, which has been on my mind for some time, is palpable.

Whether you love to write, or if you have some other creative endeavor that lights you up from the inside out, your time may feel much fuller when you make a deliberate attempt to include the magic of creativity into your daily life. Living deliberately means different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

Writing is how I suck the marrow out of life. I only recently discovered that it has to be writing spurred by joy. By making the decision to live deliberately, I’ve started to find that joy again.