A Writing Life by Sydney Salter

Every day I try to do three things: read, write and exercise. 

Reading gives me the most pleasure, of course, because it comes with assured results. I will finish reading a book if I go page by page. Right now I'm 300 pages into Pelle the Conquerer, a classic Danish novel. I have 500 pages to go, but I know that I'll chip away at those pages every morning. And I love the authenticity of the main character, Pelle--he's so wonderfully boy.

None of my other activities work the same way. 

No amount of exercise will make my body young and strong again--I'm merely fighting off the worst effects of old age at this point. I've taken up swimming after breaking my kneecap hiking in the fall. Most of the time I love the meditative quality of swimming, but sometimes I chug through the water telling myself that I am doing this so I can continue walking around cool places in the world. Glug. Glug.

And writing. Sigh. No amount of writing can be tied to any sort of success, aside from doing the writing itself. I try to make writing an end in itself, but some days writing itself is difficult and unpleasant and I drag myself to the finish-line of some self-imposed goal. Yesterday it was a query letter for an almost polished novel that I'm submitting to my local SCBWI's critique event. 

I have been writing long enough to watch most of the people who used to write alongside me give up entirely. I can't stop. What would I do--vacuum more often? 

I sustain myself with writing just for fun in my notebook. I sustain myself by creating and meeting goals. I sustain myself with excitement about the next story I'm going to write. I sustain myself by reading about other writers. This week I read On Writing And Failure by Stephen Marche. It's not for the faint-hearted. It's for writers like me--the ones who can't stop. 

Here's Stephen Marche's essay from the NYT Book Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/books/review/writers-failure-joyce-melville-boethius.html