In Spite of Everything, We Write

I wish I could tell you I write every day. I wish I could tell you I go into my study every morning at 8 AM and don't come out until 5 PM. But, it's not true. I don't. I write when I can get myself to write and every day is a struggle.

What I need is a man with a whip. I need a devil-man to pop a leather-thonged whip over my sorry sleeping and laying-in-bed-coffee-drinking self and to say: "Get thee to a study and write." And, after I drag myself downstairs I need him to lock me in the room for eight hours.

The French writer, Collette, had her much older and accomplished husband Willy (pronounced Villy), her man with a whip. He quite literally locked the young and inexperienced Collette in her room every day to write. She wrote novel after novel. He published them under his name. When she perfected her craft, she left him.

But, few of us will have a Willy. Few of us will have Virginia Woolf's "room of one's own," much less what I consider essential for writing, a whole house of one's own.

So, we struggle to create every day, every hour in less than conducive conditions.

Women write and wash clothes, write and plan meals, write and shop, write and clean, and clean, and clean. We care take, placate, appease, mediate and manage. We silence our own demons of self doubt if only for a few hours. But we still write - and for this we should be proud of ourselves.