It’s About the Work Stupid

Often I read film and writing magazines, and stumble across articles relating to why the writer writes. While there is almost always an acknowledgment of the need to get paid, and then the joy of getting published, at the core, the reason for the work IS the work.

As a writer of books, poems, short stories, screenplays, and an opera (yes, I wrote an opera once), I must admit to having lost my way as to my reason for writing. I don’t know why or how I lost my way, but my daughter helped me find it again.
Over the last year or so, I’ve started a number of writing project, but have not completed them. I would usually think that the story wasn’t worth publishing because the financial return on investment wouldn’t justify the effort put into writing it. At times, it was the other way around.

With the pending birth of my daughter last summer, I cleared my plate of all writing projects. That’s right; I wrote nothing except this blog. I made way for her addition in my life and figured I probably wouldn’t be able to do anything until 2007. Maybe I would be one of those people who have kids and then stop doing the things whoever hooked up with them and wanted to have kids, found so compelling in the first place.

Then something strange happened. Since I do my best writing at, I found that after my daughter would sleep during my “shift,” I would have pockets of time (a half-hour here, forty-five minutes there) where I would have absolute quiet anywhere between 10:30 P.M. and 2 A.M. When I didn’t use that time to count sheep, I would work on a short-story for a contest that I wanted to enter, more than I wanted to win. I was so engaged in the guidelines that, although I found out about the contest a month before the deadline, I cranked out the final draft and popped it in the mail ten days ahead of schedule. For work I considered rushed, it was decent. I was proud not only that I had a good story, but that I finished it with time to spare. That never happens to me.

I’ve started reading the Letters of Ayn Rand, She's a writer who exemplifies what I mean about the work being paramount. Money is necessary, publication is validating, (both of which I’ve experienced), but it is the passion for the work and what the writer has to say that drives him or her to write when the work is long and hard, when payday isn’t here yet, and your next (of first) publishing is nowhere in site.