by Elton Gahr

Created on: April 16, 2009

Many of the best writing books I have read started with what I have decided is the first rule of writing. "If you can imagine yourself doing anything else don't even consider a career in writing.". This may seem harsh or perhaps an attempt to keep out as much competition as possible, but it's excellent advice for many more things than writing. There is great joy in writing and at times it feels like a gift, but just as often it feels like a curse.

The gift is the easier to understand which, I fear, is the reason that writing is so appealing to so many people. The idea of creation is something that all humans crave, as is understanding, and power and so many of those other things that come with writing. If anyone has ever had a moment of epiphany they understand the joy of suddenly seeing the entire solution to a problem fall in front of them.

Even beyond that as writers we are able to create friends. We can talk to those voices in our head for hours creating wonderful stories about them, putting them, and with them ourselves into adventures that we could never achieve in any other way. As a writer you can go into space, be the first European to walk across the Americas, fight space aliens or even have the powers of a wizard. We can fall in love and have it work out every time or confront our greatest fears.

Better even that that though we can share all of this with others. We can show the world our visions and dreams, allow others to travel with us to those places. We can create beauty and the entire world can see it.

The curse is something more sinister because it is hidden behind all of this. The first part you must understand of the curse is that in order for any of the gifts to truly be realized writing must be something more than a job. Writing, in order to truly fulfill what we want in our minds must become an obsession.

If you have ever felt that feeling of coming home at night from a hard day's work putting your feet up and relaxing for the weekend. That knowledge that work is done and there is nothing to do but spend time with your friends and family for the next two days. As a writer you must give up that feeling entirely. A writer may stop occasionally but he is never done. Writing is a cancer that invades all parts of your life.

As you write more you begin to see this world as little more than material for your writing. You see people not as friends but as interesting characters who might work well in your next story, you stop thinking of love and start thinking about how this could be great motivation for your protagonists. You climb a mountain not because you want to climb but because you need the reference for your book and the writer becomes a junkie trying to survive in the world until he can get his next fix. It is for this reason that so many great writers are drug abusers and alcoholics.

Neither of these views is completely true though. Writing is not a joyride into a countryside that you created with all of your best friends for a day on the beach that will last forever and it is not a tormenting cancer that consumes everything you are but it is a little of both. A writer may not loose the ability to enjoy his friends, but he can easily loose the ability to enjoy reading most books, and he might not feel that rush of endorphins because of true epiphany often, but he can feel the pride of finishing a story and knowing it was good and in the end it mostly evens out leaving only the question of if you love what you are doing and if you can imagine doing anything else.

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