I have a rosebush that my grandmother started from a twig she plucked from a bush at her mother’s home some sixty years ago.  When we sold my grandmother’s home, I dug up that very same bush and hauled it eighteen hundred miles to plant at my home, where it has flourished. I keep starting new bushes from it, and last spring I took one of those little beginners a thousand miles to plant at my son’s new home. The small thing instantly began growing with pretty shoots and verdent green leaves, which son’s dog promptly chomped off. Eventually the dog ate the entire bush– yes, thorns and all–right down to the ground! Now the dog is gone (She tended to want to chew on neighbors and delivery people, too, so a new home with a fence had to be found.) and, if you look closely at where the bush is planted, you can see the promise of green life stirring yet again.

 That’s me and this blogging site. Each time I put forth a new piece of writing here, along comes life and chomps me right off.  Such is the way with any good endeavor, anything that is creative in nature. Resistance, Steven Pressfield names it in his book, The War of Art, saying that the more important the action is to our particular soul’s growth, the more Resistance we will encounter while we pursue it. He capitalizes Resistance, giving it personification.

There is always another chance…This thing called failure is not the falling down but staying down.   — Mary Pickford

The thing is to keep getting up and trying again. You will get somewhere, and very often it is far further and in a direction more grand than you ever imagined. My efforts at this blog have led me to decide to install a blog at my own url. Easy everyone said. Ha! But, oh, what an adventure! And often I think of that little rosebush, and smile.

Writing is a wholetime job; no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.  — W. Somerset Maugham

It isn’t a question of will you write today. It is a question of what you will write. A writer writes, because he cannot not do so, and keep his sanity.

I used to think that I could give up writing whenever I chose, which would be whenever I felt I had a nest egg that would keep me fed and happy. It seemed that I had somehow fallen into writing novels and selling them, that I wrote as a job and paycheck the same as getting up and going in to be a clerk in a supermarket. Some of that was true…but there is always more to the story.

What I came, finally, to realize was that I could, maybe, give up writing novels, but I will be writing until the day I die. I write every day in some way. I write e-mails and letters on real paper when I can squeeze in the chance. These can become long missives when I am not working on a novel, proof that I am given to lengthy expression. I write in my head when I am away from the keyboard. I compose things I want to explain to someone, or I imagine a character in a scene.

I write each morning in a journal, where I record all manner of thoughts and struggles. Sometimes I’m in such a snit about a matter that I write in my journal several times a day. (It keeps me from spontaneous compustion.) I have imagined someone reading my journals when I am dead and gone, and saying, “My Lord, she was a neurotic.” Which of course is why the journals, all 30 or 40 of them are tucked in the safe.

The main point is that a writer writes, and writes constantly. Feeling like it has nothing to do with it. I can’t say that I especially feel like writing when I first open my eyes, but I have formed the habit of sitting up, putting on my glasses and opening my journal for my daily page. It is what I do, as much a part of me as my blue eyes.

And, if you are going to be writing anyway, and expressing ideas that can very likely have some sort of impact on a reader, you might as well get some money, or at the very least a kick out of it in published form.

It is the act of writing that makes a writer, nothing else.