Living the Questions: Should You Have Children if You Want to Write?
Years ago, a science-fiction writer named Judith Merrill told me she couldn’t write after her children left home.
Without the structure children imposed on her day, she was lost.
My daughter Sam transformed my day too. In order to raise her and write fiction I had to learn to say no to other people’s expectations.
Her birth was the start of my creative life.
Living the Questions: What Advice Gives Writers Confidence?
Ignore the advice to write about what you know.
Write about what obsesses you and what you know will transform every word you say. Why? Because what you know will come into play naturally and that’s the best way to write.
Living the Questions: Where Do Writers Live?
Anywhere that’s cheap.
Writing is a lifestyle and luckily, it has perks. People often rent to writers at a discount because writers are quiet. (Well, most writers.) That’s how it was for me at the Hotel Chelsea when Jerry Weinstein ran the desk. There’s a Jerry Weinstein for every writer if you keep an eye out. Look around and see.
Living the Questions: How Do Writers Make a Living?
This new series on the blog is inspired by the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, who wrote in a letter to a toiling poet:
“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
A writer’s life is filled with frustrations. There’s writing and there’s making money. How do you do both?
One year I earned $160,000 from a book to film deal and not a cent the next. I made the writing life work by having one reliable source of income and freelancing the rest.
Below are a series of photos taken by Irene Grainger. The theme of the photographs is the frustrations of the writing life.
Here’s what others say:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/canada-authors-poorer-than-ever-says-study-1.4908086