The most valuable lesson I have ever learned about writing is this:
In order to write well, you have to live fully.
This little discovery of mine started out as an excuse. I spent my young young adult years in total resistence of the notion of writing as a career path, largely because I was afraid my life would come to a screeching halt if I tried to make a living from writing. Yes, writing fills my soul and teaches me about myself and enables me to reach strangers on the other side of the country, blah, blah, blah. But I always had this image that if I wrote, I (who am already inclined toward excessive solitude) would end rotting away in a dank corner of some dark apartment, breaking myself away from my computer screen only long enough to make conversation with my own thoughts. Was that the life I wanted?
No, it wasn't. I wasn't going to be a writer. I was going to be a pastor. No, wait. A teacher of the Deaf. No, no, I'm sorry. An actor. Yes. An actor.
I was going to see the world, experience new things, spend my time around other human beings.
And so it happened that I spent several years chasing anything but the written word, only to find myself mysteriously back at the keyboard, in the corner of my apartment, my soul filling with each carefully chosen word.
Well, I suppose you can't get away from the things you love. So I decided at the beginning of this year to give freelance writing a shot. I was going to write for a living. I made the proper announcements, hit up Amazon for all the "so you wanna be a freelance writer" type publications, and started applying for jobs. But all the while I reminded myself that there would be no darkness, no excessive isolation, and absolutely no rotting away.
This is how my blog, Hollywood Back Roads, was born. I set a goal to visit a lesser-known area of Southern California every weekend and blog about it the following week. It was practical. I could get out and explore all in the name of gathering expertise in a specfic area. After all, a beginning writer cannot support herself on fiction alone, and if I was going to be an expert on something, it might as well be something that got me out of the house.
That was a good call, since getting out of the house changes everything.
Each new venture is a new discovery about myself, about my surroundings, about the people who occasionally come along for my outings. Since the beginning of Hollywood Back Roads, I have felt the odd sensation of being at home in a "foreign land" while my brother and I watched Malibu children leap into a swimming hole all Missouri-style. I've seen the faces of uprooted American Indians twisted in anguish on a wall mural painted by their descendants. I have felt the ocean waves pulse around my feet as I stood on the shore and watched a seal dive and drift only twenty feet away.
Yes, I now know what time the Getty Center closes and how to get to the Venice Canals. But more importantly, I have a new vocabulary. Words like "banjo" and "crest" and "fern" are suddenly brand new. History and Nature reintroduce themselves as old characters in a new light. This exploration is very likely one of the best things I have ever done for my fiction.
I see now that there is little need to guard myself against the hermity writer's lifestyle. A writer has to explore and experience. There is no choice. I cannot write about the world if I am not an active part of it.
When our own dear Coffee Stained Writer invited me to guest blog while she was on maternity leave, I wondered briefly if she was at all irritated by the writing time she'd lose to her son. (Obviously, I am not a mother.) Immediately after, I laughed at such a silly notion. A son is not an interruption to her career. Quite the opposite! While Nicole is bonding with her child, she will be developing a whole new vocabulary of her own, with new meanings for words like "love" and "family" and "diaper rash." Every day her mind will collect new ideas for characters and relationships, conflicts and themes. And while I suspect she has chosen to reproduce for personal reasons like love and family, the fact of the matter is, this whole motherhood thing is a brilliant career move.
It is as Ben Franklin once advised: "Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing." I now keep this quote taped to the wall above my desk, lest I should forget to get out and be a human being for a little while before I lose my vision to reams and reams of otherwise meaningless paper.
So what about you? How do you keep your ideas fresh and your mind alive? How do you balance your life as a writer (or as any other professional, for that matter) with your life as a human being?
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Abi Wurdeman is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles, California with her brother Phil and her mice, LaVerne and Shirley. In addition to partnering with her brother on screenplays, Abi also writes short fiction and is currently working on her first novel. In an effort to make sure she does as much exploring as she does writing, Abi also maintains a blog, Hollywood Back Roads, exposing the lesser-known wonders of Southern California.
