A few days ago I read the short story "Miracle Mile" by Alexander MacLeod. While it's actually about competitive running, I was distracted by a particular passage that reminded me of writing and exacerbated my fears that I will never be a real writer. His narrator says, "You have to make choices: you can't run and be an astronaut. Can't run and have a full-time job. Can't run and have a girlfriend who doesn't run. When I stopped going to church or coming home for holidays, my mother used to worry that I was losing my balance, but I never met a balanced guy who ever got anything done. There's nothing new about this stuff. You have to sign the same deal if you want to be good -- I mean truly good -- at anything."
That's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid that if I don't throw myself wholeheartedly into writing, at the exclusion of everything else, I will never be successful at it. The problem is that I'm not willing to do that. Like MacLeod's narrator suggests, I feel like I am a balanced person who never gets anything done.
I've felt the same... but to counter that notion, here's alexander macleod himself:
ReplyDelete"SC: What was the most challenging aspect of the process?
AM: Just finding enough space in the schedule to get some good, clear time to work on it. I’m a full-time professor at Saint Mary’s and I had to balance writing time with my teaching responsibilities and my scholarly work and my institutional commitments. SMU has always been a great supporter of creative writing and of the literary life of Halifax so I feel very lucky to have a job at a place that values what I do. However, there are only so many hours in a day and you can’t do two things at once. A person is a member of a family before they are an artist, etc. There’s nothing new about this stuff and no reason to complain about it: every great work of literature that was ever produced had to be pulled out of the author’s available time and energy."
Thanks, Cassidy. That's a really great quote and it helps a lot to have read it.
ReplyDeleteI feel like that too, a lot of times! I barely have time to write..I'm stretched between my kids, my husband, my homework, studying and then me....and then my writing! Soo, when we do have "Available time and energy" I know something great will come out of it!
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