Saturday, November 12, 2011

There are reasons I'm not a writer

Mostly I don't have the habits for it. This blog is evidence of that, even if negative evidence is all that could testify to that particular sort of laziness.

I still have a (mostly useless) fascination with the craft of writing. I received my undergraduate minor in English composition and sat in a variety of writers' workshops and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I count Mystery and Manners, a posthumously published collection of Flannery O'Connor's essays and lectures on the craft of writing (primarily on that subject anyway) among the books that has had the most profound influence on me.

Why, as someone who only reads in fits and starts and writes even less consistently, I should enjoy the subject of writerliness I couldn't say. Every English professor I had (and Flannery, herself at times) talked about a special breed of person who had a hazy notion of wanting to be a writer but little interest in the discipline of actually sitting in front of a blank page and filling it with words.

I'm one of those.

Tonight I finished writing the lyrics to my children's musical. It took me four and a half months, which is four months longer than I had hoped.

And for the first time in my life, I am facing down the possibility that I may truly struggle with the sin of sloth.