Quote de jour

With the recent death of John Updike, I thought a little gallows humor was in order. But seriously, he sat down every day and wrote a minimum of three pages. Those few pages, over a lifetime added up to a prodigious body of work, including over fifty books.

His poem, Requiem sums up his sly humor in a neat bow tie.

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
'Oh, so young, so full
Of promise - depths unplumbable!
Instead a shrug and tearless eyes,
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
'I thought he died awhile ago.'
For life's a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register,
Nowhere but where it will occur.
                            #

There is nothing like death to motivate the living, especially if you're a writer. And isn't everyone these days? Every waiter or housewife from Hollywood to New York is a screenwriter, a novelist, or at the very least, a lowly blogger. If you're not a writer, I bet you know someone who is. But why bother? The chances of getting published are slimmer than a runway model. For every book that is a best seller, thousands languish in a remainder bin at $1.99, and that's if you're lucky. If you have ink in your veins, you write anyway. Not because you want to, but because you have to. And you keep doing it, year after year even if no one asks to read it.

I scanned John Updike's chronology of writings and heard my inner slave driver scream, "Get off your lazy butt, you're not going to live forever! Write, write, write!"
Time is a friend and an enemy. With time, most writers improve. Finding the time to write, if not every day but regularly is critical. On days you don't write, then you better be re-writing, editing or at least reading or researching. But enough brow beating. One of the best lessons I've learned about writing is to honor your own method. Find out what works for you and keep doing it. Not everyone can sit down every morning at a computer screen at churn out a few pages. I can barely make a grocery list first thing in the morning. They say you should write every day. One page a day equals one book a year. That may work or may not work for you. My writing Aha moment came a few years ago at talk given by another prolific writer, Joyce Carol Oates. She said she doesn't write every day but in spurts, once or twice a week. A veil lifted. I could almost hear an angelic choir. That's it ! I'm a spurter, a gusher, a sprinter. Gotta go. I have some re-writing to do. Thanks John.