Price

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." - Master sportswriter Red Smith

It's easy to tell the price for being a writer. It's no big secret. The price is loneliness. It's sitting at a computer shut away from the world while you put words on the screen. If you're lucky, you have friends and/or family who give you space and are grateful for your presence when you return to them. If you're unlucky, they resent the writing and the time you're not available. Lots of people have to juggle uncompromising demands on both sides. Somehow from that juggling, art emerges.

Or sometimes not. I have a friend who has a wife and children and wants to write, but they come first and he never has time, he says. Of course, plenty of writers have families and somehow write anyway. Depends on the writer's drive. How strongly does the story inside you ache to be released? Enough that you give up sleep, give up TV, give up movies, give up social occasions, give up your life?

Maybe the price is really time. The time you spend writing isn't time you can spend on anything else. Who's to say you have to be a writer, anyway? You can be anything else. The world needs more doctors, more nurses ... that would be a good career. Of course, there's a price you have to pay for any career. Nothing worthwhile comes free.

Could the price be your soul? You put the words out there, and people hate them. What you sweated over -- what you bled over -- they dislike. It's a whip to your heart. Or worse, they ignore them. Your books are remaindered, your paragraphs forgotten. You disappear in the flood of written words. Nobody notices when you go under for the third time. You don't matter.

Perhaps the price is you. Who you are, what you believe, the things you do, your hopes, your dreams ... That's what's required of you. Everything.

And in the end, you'll have the success you deserve, but it might not be the success you wanted. Not everyone has bestsellers. Not everyone saves the world. Not everyone gets to be happy. Can you live with that?

Can you put words on paper even though only your cat will ever hear them? Are the worlds in your head worth the world you're neglecting here? Can you explain to your lover on your anniversary that you just have to finish the latest chapter? Are you willing to put in the backbreaking work? Are you willing to have your heart broken?

Can you give it all? Whatever your dream is, can you give it everything?

'Cause that's the price.

That's always the price.

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