What external factors play the biggest role in my writing life, good or bad?
The most prosaic ones.
The most difficult were the beginnings, when I quit my day job and turned to idling, or rather - writing. Everything was an obstacle. Perhaps, unconsciously, I was looking for reasons to push writing aside? Whatever the case, all of a sudden things were throwing themselves in front of me, preventing me from working – the irritating tap was dripping somewhere in the house, a wobbling chair had to be fixed immediately, etc.
In time I managed to work out some self-discipline, which turned into a routine. Yep – routine. I’d prefer to call it an internal peace, but peace is only a side effect of routine. Routine allowed my mind to ignore the outside and concentrate on the inside.
I started writing. It wasn’t going quite as smoothly as I imagined it would. My concentration was easily broken by all those evil things, such as the telephone. It seemed to ring off the damn hook, until I figured out how to turn it off.
Then there is the mess. Messy thoughts in a messy house, wrote Dostoevsky. Messy house, bloody thoughts, I would add. Clutter drives me crazy, makes me wan to kill. My characters die when my head can’t get around the damn mess. I guess it’s not that bad, as long as the killing is confined to fictional life, but I take no chances – when I’m about to explode I grab the vacuum cleaner and go mediaeval at it all…
But then, with the mess out of the way the weather decides not to cooperate. Grey skies output grey thoughts. Fortunately they usually blow off before I loose it as I do with clutter. Sun comes out again, and again, and things are good again, until… family obligations kick in. The need of civil coexistence inside the family unit is perhaps the biggest pain in the ass. No one seems to understand that you really, really care more about the book then about the damn dinner. The prospect of a weekend makes me drop writing all together. You know, sometimes you’re working on a passage that you know requires total concentration, which may last 10 days straight. You absolutely can’t break, or you’ll have to start all over. With a weekend ahead and your family lurking to steal you away you may as well forget it, until you figure out how to split the passage and work on it incrementally. Similarly, meeting with distant relatives or friends (amazing these still hover around!) creates a huge writing block – why start something you won’t be able to finish when you have to pretend you’re happy that they remembered your birthday?!
Yeah, writing is not a social event. One doesn’t write in a ballroom. A writer works best in a dungeon, a torture chamber, if that chamber is only in his own head. But one also needs a ray of sun, a tiny whole of a window that pours life into one’s writing. When that window is closed a writer is no more. I like and need my window. Sometimes it’s an actual window that looks out on a huge dense hemlock, a home to a happy chickadee family; sometimes it’s just an empty schedule, time without any distractions. In those moments, even the usually annoying cats’ meowing turns into gentle cheering.
