From the Fiction Desk

While many writers may have home offices or may go outside of the home to write, we all have a facility that is critical to our achievement. Over the next few weeks, this blog will be dedicated to this wonderful facility. What facility is it? A facility made of flesh and bone and blood, filled with the energies of our creativity and our drive to write. The facility is our own body, our minds and our souls. Writers, in general, are able to write anywhere. We do not, in theory, need a specific office to write. We do need ourselves. Our bodies, our minds, and our spirits require maintenance as much as an facility we may sit and write in.

Writing is a lone and lonely vocation. We spend long hours sitting in front of our writing instruments or in front of our research mining what nuggets we can. Our neighbors or friends may hold a party and we cannot go because we have a deadline. We may be on a date with our spouses or lovers and have to cut the date short—spending time to apologize, if not order flowers and pick up a hallmark card, so we can get back to what we were writing because somewhere a clock is ticking and the editor or publisher want something yesterday.

As I wrote about novels, writing can be a siege and we spend a lot of energy trying to get it done while fending off phone calls, people begging for us to volunteer our time here and there (after all, all we do is sit somewhere and write. “Certainly we have more time than someone with a corporate job” or “All you do is lock yourself up in your office when you get home from your bill paying job, certainly you could spend a few hours doing . . . .” ) and still fulfilling the roles of human beings with friends and families while fending off burnout and keeping our muse fired with desire to write whatever it is that we are working on.

If you are a writer and you find your head nodding to the above in understanding of the overload that comes with our lives, then what do you do? How do you avoid the cracks that may form in the foundation of our souls? How do you keep energized or even healthy? I would love to hear from you. This blog will explore exercise, socializing, and all the other things writers can do. There is no silver bullet, but keeping us healthy and functional as a writer is as important as understanding how to write dialogue or description or even to plot a story.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates to blogs and stories that I write.