On Hiatus - Can a Writer Take a Break?

Must writers write every day? I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone has to do anything every day, and we can still say we are writers. Yes, a writer writes. But a neurosurgeon might also one day write, and their work might be just as amazing as any other writer’s work, even a writer who wrote every day for decades. And someone’s mother might pick up a pen one day and slay me with what they write after decades of silence. Why not? We are creative!

Why do we “should” on ourselves? (I mean with the nonsense, like, “I should write every day, or else I’m not a real writer.”) This is a threat! This is a diminishing and a cruelty. Why do we do it? If writing is easy and fun and joyful, then we start to question how good it might be. Because we want a certain degree of discipline in order to validate that we are really doing something worthwhile. Because we live in a capitalist, transactional society. Our culture believes things that are good are expensive and worth time and effort. Our culture also says if you don’t get paid for it, it’s not worth anything.

But the impulse to make something is a deeply human impulse. Anyone can have it at any time in their lives. And what they make doesn’t need to bring them money to be worthwhile. But more important than that, it doesn’t need to make sense for a long time.

Often when I’m writing, I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know why I’m writing what I’m writing or what I might do with it later. Sometimes I don’t even know if it’s a play or a poem or a story or an essay. Why must I? Our society loves to label, categorize, jab, stab and fry things on skewers. We love to judge. But the process of creating anything, whether written or painted or sculpted (etc), is the process of suspending judgment until some later period of time in the process. No one says to a pregnant woman, “your baby doesn’t have eyes yet!” That would be absurd and cruel. How can it have eyes right away?

We are impatient. We are taught to be impatient. We are encouraged to be impatient. Impatience means we are willing to pay for faster shipping, cheaper production values, and all the other things this capitalist world wants us to freely pay for.

Patience means we have the skill to sit in the chair and do the work we are called to do as we are called to do it. We have the patience to suspend our judgment over what it might be.

I write when I need to write. That happens to be quite a lot. I write a lot. But I happen to have a habit of writing. I understand myself and the world via writing. I think it has a lot to do with how my brain works. I often don’t know what I think or feel unless I’m writing. But that’s how I work. You may work differently.

Let’s be kind to ourselves. Let’s try to discover what works best for us at the moment. With mindful kindness. Without judgment. Writers can still be writers even on days or weeks or years when we don’t write. We will never forget how (unless we sustain a brain injury).

I am taking a break from Brave Space because I’m in developmental rehearsals for Tanya’s Lit Clit. I’m working with Experimental Bitch, the company that commissioned it, to turn it into a musical. I’ll be back in Brave Space May 18th and 20th and onward from then. I hope you’ll join me!