Sarah Et Cetera

Tenor of things has changed around here lately, don’t you think? I was reading through some archives this past weekend, and I kept coming back to the same thought: I used to be interesting. I used to do more than just make snarky remarks and tiptoe around topics I’m pretty sure most of you don’t care about. So I asked myself for whom I’m really blogging. Am I doing this as an exercise for myself, or because I want to connect, or because I feel beholden to an increasingly known group of people. And I answered all three, in different ways. But the last part distressed me. Why should I feel compelled to entertain you? I like doing it. I like making you happy. But I very much need to quit the idea that you (and all y’all) and I share some kind of emotional economy. Not only is that pitiable, but I think it ensures neither one of us will ever be satisfied.

I’ve had a lot of reason to think about the process of writing lately, both fiction and nonfiction. I had a great night last night where I sat and wrote and made slow, good progress on an old story while chatting with Doc for the first time in what seemed liked forever but was maybe all of 10 days. The ease with which the words flowed hadn’t happened in a while. Most of what I’ve written in the last several months has seemed like hard work, and I think that that came across in the tenor of the stories– they seem a little shaky and distracted, like they’d very much rather be doing something else. I have no explanations for this. And I get disgusted with flowery language about mythological forces of inspiration. I just managed to find my groove is all. Maybe Doc is the secret. I wouldn’t put it past him.

Then I read The Ten Commandments of the Happy Writer. I clicked on it from a makeup blog, so it seemed incongruous in a morning spent reading about lipgloss textures and amortizing the cost of a quad of eyeshadow, but that incongruity worked, because number ten struck me:

10. Keep writing. Didn’t find an agent? Keep writing. Book didn’t sell? Keep writing. Book sold? Keep writing. OMG an asteroid is going to crash into Earth and enshroud the planet in ten feet of ash? Keep writing. People will need something to read in the resulting permanent winter.

I realized that, even with the ugly, hard work and even when I put things out there and they get ignored (and oh, do they!), and even when I spend more time hitting “next” on iTunes and playing Free Cell than I do actually typing anything that might ever entertain anybody–and that’s a lot!– I still get more out of writing than I do out of doing much of anything else. I do it because I like to do it. It feels good. I do it because I want to connect with you, even if you don’t want to connect with me. I do it because it gives me a little zing of joy to tell a story. I do it because yeah, I really get off on people responding to those stories. It’s a miracle, when you think about it. It’s a miracle to thrust yourself into the void and not merely touch, but connect and not just to one person, but to many, who then also touch and connect.

There was, before last night, and before this morning, a dark and subtle tickle in the back of my head that had begun to intimate that it was time to hang it up, if for no other reason than the personal ego-economy of things was not trending favorably. But I’ll believe that people need something to read. And if you choose to read what I write, brilliant. I need to read, too, and I often like what I have to say.