Doing things because they are good for us seems like the obvious choice but most will attest to growing up defying the maternal chant of “Eat your vegetables – they’re good for you”.  For many writers doing what is good for us still seems to elude us in some child-like fashion.

The benefits of the so called writer’s lifestyle are right up there with an apple a day and read like a prescription for a long and healthy life. So why the self-protest? Why the constant angst to justify what we do for a living, not only to our family and friends but even more so, to our own self?

What could be better for you? The benefits of writing are endless, but from a simple business perspective alone it is best put by home office based Adair Lara, author and prize winning columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle who shares that “I am never not working but I am also seldom truly at work”. 

How true for those of us in this profession who have the privilege to do what we love and love what we do. The hard work of writing is endless at times and we celebrate our good days and wallow in our bad but the impulsive nurturing writing world lets us enjoy the beauty of creating while the inspiration is there and doing the laundry while it is not.  If you are really talented you can master accomplishing both at once, but in my family’s experience it’s either one or the other.

The rewards of entrepreneurship as an alternative to a traditional career path go hand and hand with the writing life-style.  Dictate your own hours, live where you work and work where you live, pick and choose, and simplify your life.  After more than 25 years climbing the corporate ladder in two careers and still not self-satisfied I knew that I needed to be my own boss but more importantly I needed to do what I know best.  I needed to nurture my will to write.

 "It is never to late to be what you might have been" George Eliot (1819 - 1880), the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, English Novelist

I truly believe that nurturing your will to write will be fed by what life brings you to write about. Jung aptly described it, as “That which is most personal is most common”.  Write what you know, write what is in your life and you will feed your passion for words with your life experiences. When I find I am struggling with writing it is often because I am not personally balancing who I am with what I do.

One of the best writings I continue to enjoy over and over, is Stephen King’s bestseller On Writing. King sets out to describe the benefits of the writing lifestyle in a simplistic straightforward manner by simply telling us not how he writes but rather how he lives and in that insight in some round-about way he offers endless valuable lessons on how to write. King unknowingly backs up my belief that there is some positive harmony in life and writing. A hundred pages into the book he speaks of his office space, his own desk, about the job and what he came to know:

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room.  Life isn’t a support system for art.  It’s the other way around.”   Stephen King