The Thing About Being a Writer...

Mood: Frustrated (Really? My laptop is about to become a missle like object in an effort to diffuse the angst of writer's block. And for those of you who say it doesn't exist? I hope that my purple, sparkly laptop slams upside your head. I think the thud would be very satisfying.)

What I'm Watching: Lying to be Perfect (One of the few times I've given into the lure of a Lifetime Movie. This time it was because the description sounded suspiciously like a book I recently read. Turns out that I was totally right...it is based on the book I read. Go me!)

...is that you have to be just a little unbalanced to do it. Really, we spend all day (and sometimes most of the night) talking to people and about people who don't exist outside the confines of our own minds (although, I wouldn't want to mention that to my main character Rory, she doesn't know she's not exactly, well, a real person...she's a bit sensitive about it in fact). Let's face it, if we didn't do that sitting at a computer screen under the guise of "being creative", we'd be sitting in a nice padded cell under the guise of being completely off our rockers.

After spending all afternoon trying to figure out why, exactly, my main character continues to thwart my writing process, I have come to the conclusion that spending the day arguing with a fictional character in my mind might qualify me for the short line to the prozac express. Thankfully I'm okay with the idea of being slightly off my nut. After all, as a writer, I'm in very good company: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemmingway and Sylvia Plath just to name a few. All very talented, very successful and very mentally unbalanced writers. Now I'm not endorsing putting ones head in an oven ala Sylvia Plath or using a shotgun to pierce one's ears ala Ernest Hemmingway, I'm simply saying that there is a long line of connection between creative genius and slight bent towards the insane. Which means that my insanity isn't an affliction it's a manifestation of my creative genius!!



So, embrace your inner writer and your inner writer's inner crazy person. Run with it and let it unleash the power of your creative genius! But, if you find yourself thinking of the oven as a place to keep your head? Well, they make medication for that now. You might want to get some.