I Need To Write

We writers all have different reasons for writing, but the one reason I think that puzzles non-writers the most is the need to write.  They do not understand how writing can be a need.  Even though I am a writer, that particular reason to write used to puzzle me as well.  But not any more.  I've discovered that I'm a writer who needs to write.

I've written all my life.  I started with cheesy poetry as a kid, wrote a few kid short stories, tried my hand at lyrics (sucked), and went back to short stories around high school with an interest in writing a novel.  Didn't have novel ideas at the time, but was definitely interested.  Even after some dufus "pointed out" that everyone was writing the "great American Novel" and that anything I wrote would probably land in the circular file, I kept writing.  To be sure, i stopped with the short stories and went back to poetry (it was safe) and eventually picked up gaming (which was safer) as outlets for my need to write, but I never stopped writing even when my goals for it changed because some idiot told me I couldn't cut it and I was too sensitive a kid to take that and use it to fire me up.  I wrote until I started subbing, and even then, for the most part, I found ways to write.

However, the one time writing would fall out of my life was when I was long term subbing.  Long term subbing takes up your entire life because you may be the sub, but you ARE the teacher, no matter how impermanent.  You create lesson plan, hunt down or create materials, create tests, grade, go to meetings, and do everything that the regular teacher does.  There's no time for life, much less writing when subbing long term.  It's a hard job and I enjoyed it for about 3 years.  My last long term position took all the joy out of the job for me, and I finally resigned from subbing at all.  But whether I loved them or hated them, there was one thing all my long term positions had in common....

The lack of writing.

I had no time to write at all.  I barely had time to read more than the textbooks at hand, the materials from meetings, and so on and so forth.  Long term subbing was hard.  But I'd had other sub positions that were longer than a day and shorter than a week, positions where I was expected to create/grade the homework and so on, and I never had the same downturn in emotions and attitude as I did when long terming for months.  The biggest difference?  No writing.  For MONTHS.  Not a few days, not a week or so -- months.

And I discovered what happens when I don't write fresh words for a long time:  I become irritable and snappish, I lose interest in other things I enjoy, the PS2 gets more time than my creative well, and I end up being someone very different, someone unlikable and almost impossible to live with.  Once I start writing, and I mean writing fresh words, new words, working on stories and creative projects that are new  and untouched, all of the nastiness fades away.  I come back to myself.

I haven't been writing for awhile.  Oh, every now and then I pick up Phoenix, but I don't work on it consistently.  My focus has been A.C. and critiques for my writing group, not new stuff.  In fact, most of the stuff I've even looked at lately is stuff that needs revisions.  I even set aside my short stories for a few months because I was tired of dealing with the market aspect of things.  I never even thought that there might be another reason to write those shorts: to keep me sane while I worked on the novels.  And lately there seems to be a change of mood that has no other real source, nothing I can point at and go "that's what's making me this way."  That's how it always is for me when the not writing mood builds -- it seems to have no real source that I can point to for the reason.

So, tonight I'm going to set aside A.C. despite being behind, set aside the crit I started, even set aside Phoenix and work on a new short instead.  And starting tonight, I'm going to try to make sure I get fresh words in at least every few days.  I suspect it will not only help my moodiness, but that it just might help me become faster in my revisions and help with the restlessness and lack of motivation that's been plaguing me lately.

Some of us writers write because we NEED to write.  Apparently I'm one of them and I better stop ignoring that fact.