Writers, write.
Writing a report no one cares about.
My paternal grandparents were actors. They had day jobs too and by the time I came along had long since given up the stage. My grandmother and I would watch movies and discuss them. I remember we watched an bad movie with a great actor, the role wasn’t great, the writing wasn’t great and the movie was…well you know. Not great. I expressed my shock that such a distinguished actor would be in such a bad movie. My grandmother said, “Actors act.”
To be frank I didn’t get it then.
No, with a little over fifty-years on this rock I understand it. Now, decades later I am a writer. I am not sure when I crossed that line. I have a few old and very close friends who would tell you that I have been one for a long time. Decades. I would counter with I was someone who would write but I am not a writer. In my mind I became a writer when one summer day on Block Island I stood up from the laptop and said to my friends, enjoying afternoon cocktails around me; “I’m done.” I had just finished my first manuscript, my first novel. That was it. I was a writer, not just some guy who wrote some pretty good short stories.
That is me. My experience. There are many writers out there and they each know at what point, what goal, what benchmark they became a writer. There are many who write and will never get published, that doesn’t mean they aren’t a writer. It’s a hard game to crack into and I will be the first to say that I got very, very lucky. The world is full of talented writers who don’t get lucky or published.
These days I write. I write a lot. Two weekly blogs, one novel a year, sometimes more. The occasional short story. The blogs are unforgiving. Once a week on Substack and once a weeks something smaller here on this platform. I am under no grand illusion or self-delusion that anyone is overly interested in what I ate for a meal or my musings on life. I do it because one it keeps me out there in the Google-verse and two because it helps me hone my craft.
It’s like throwing free throws or three pointers, it takes thousands if not tens of thousands of them before anyone is any good at it. But also, writers, write. Recently we had a little holiday around here you may have heard of called Thanksgiving. It’s fine holiday, the weather here was miserable by anyone else’s standard, cold and rainy. Traffic was horrible but for me the worst part of the holiday was the fact that it was a day that I didn’t write.
I resent the days that I don’t write. Is it a compulsion? No but it is compulsive. Maybe that is part of my success is that I am driven to it. I don’t know. I just know that my grandmother would get it. Writers, write.