The Writing Life

I've always wanted to be a writer.  As a teenager, I imagined the writing life to be something like this: me hunched over a small, wooden writing desk in a cramped attic room with the weak winter sun streaming through a dingy window, dust motes floating in the air.  I would be wearing lots of bulky layers to ward off the ever present, nagging chill, a scarf draped around my neck and those funky knit gloves with the tips of the fingers missing so I could grip my pen.  I would subsist on tea and dry toast.  (Mind you, dear gentle reader, I said dry toast, not buttered toast.  It's an important distinction.)

Very Charles Dickens-esque, isn't it?  

Here's the reality:  I carry a little black journal in my purse at all times.  When an idea pops into my head, usually at odd moments,  I jot it down.  I scribble observations too.  Like the grocery store cashier who pursed and wiggled her lips like a fish as she scanned each of my items.  No doubt it was an unconscious habit.  But wouldn't that make an excellent character trait for a novel?  

I write in my journal late at night after the boys are in bed asleep (like now).  I find the hours of 10 PM and midnight to be rather productive writing hours.  I recently finished a manuscript--an entire novel--written entirely during stolen moments.   

I'm always thinking of characters, what they would say, how they would look, what they would do.  Ideas are constantly simmering away in my mind. (That's why I can be a bit absentminded.  I'm not thinking about the task at hand.  Instead, I'm thinking if a character would really say that line I just thought of.) 

Even though I dream of spending every waking hour writing, writing, writing, I don't think I would be as productive that way.  My mind works much more efficiently when I say to myself: you've got two hours--get something accomplished! 

As always, thanks for reading my posts.