A few weeks ago, I went to hear Ann Friedman in conversation with Charlotte Shane. Ann is, you might have gathered, a friend; I'd never met Charlotte before, though I'd read her Tinyletter, Prostitute Laundry, along with everyone else on my internet as it was being sent over the course of the last few years. At one point in their conversation Ann asked Charlotte a question about writing-- whether she felt it was something she needed to do or not. 

I'll tip my hand here: I hate it when writers talk about their work that way. I've been writing since I learned the alphabet-- I don't know how not to write! I would die if I couldn't do it. Etcetera. It's an ungenerous impulse, but what that kind of talk always makes me think is: has anyone ever really tried to make you stop writing? Because I feel like if someone was actually threatening your life, you would figure out a way.

Don't get me wrong: I love writing. Obviously! I have spent the better part of my life finding time for it between obligations, and even now, when I'm supposed to be using it to make a living, I keep prioritizing things like this Tinyletter because I like the idea of keeping channels open, making sure there are always places I can write however, whenever I feel like it without having to worry about having a pitch, a hook, a deadline, a willing outlet.

So I do understand the urge to talk about it like a necessity, but it also strikes me fundamentally incorrect usage: like when people win awards and say they are humbled by the honor. Because it's not that we don't know how to stop writing. It's that saying we have to sounds better than admitting we want it so badly we'll always keep doing it despite any consequences. I won't stop is not the same thing as I can't, but god would we like to believe it was. 

Charlotte, in her answer, talked about the difference between needing to write and needing to share it, which I thought was a useful distinction. If you grow up writing-- which most people who identify as writers do-- it becomes a load-bearing piece of your mental architecture, something without which it is sometimes genuinely difficult to sort out your own opinion or emotion on a particular matter. She quoted Didion on the subject, so I will, too: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking." Fair enough. It's the insistence that the rest of the world should necessarily honor or engage with that process that I find honestly baffling. How young are children when we explain that not everyone wants to hear about last night's dream?

But it's more than that-- it's the underlying insistence that being a writer is an identity or, worse still, a calling. That it's something you are, not something you do. The difference between the aspirational airiness of lifestyle and the mundanity of living a life: the idea that writing is ever anything but a practice, which will never leave you but which you also cannot be done with. Writers fantasize about having an audience because having an audience means you have something you've finished enough to share; it's an obsession with the Instagramable state of having written, rather than the messy, selfish, unjustifiable ongoing process of doing something that may never be worthwhile for anyone but your self: sitting down, again and again, to write. 

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What have I written recently? Mostly a lot of emails complaining about how I was sick, which I was for ten very long days. More interestingly: this piece on the bloggers who are convinced that all of Taylor Swift's public romances are a cover for her long-term relationship with supermodel Karlie Kloss. 

I'd also highly recommend Rufi Thorpe's Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid for a different perspective on how writing and life intersect with one another.