Slaving in the Coalmines...

I'm feeling crotchety and grumpy today. Real life has collided with writing life and there has been an audible smashing sound. Not sure exactly what broke yet, or how I should go about picking up the pieces, but this is one of those horrible times when people in my life want me to do something, and either cannot or will not accept that I can't.

I'm writing.

No, I'm not slaving in the coalmines. But writing is work, and it's hard, and it takes effort and most of all, time. It's just as mentally exhausting as being in an office, on the phone, writing reports or entering data - in fact it's a lot harder because everything that appears on the page has to come from within you, not from a handy programme on your computer or a bunch of stats that your PA gave you.

Yes, at times it's also far more enjoyable than putting together marketing reports, but at the end of the day writing is a craft as well as an art, and it doesn't happen by sprinkling faery-dust over the pages. It happens because you sit down for several hours a day and DO IT.

For many people in a writer's life - often our nearest and dearest - it's impossible to understand this. Your friends and family think it's amazing that you're a writer, but they still cling to that belief that writing works by a strange process of 'inspiration', whereby scribbling for an hour now and again will produce a novel in a few months time. People who would never dream of calling you up in your office and expecting you to skip out on a meeting will expect you to drop your writing, and will get hurt, offended and annoyed when you can't.

And yes, that's can't, not won't. If you are your own boss, you need to be twice as strict with yourself as another person would be or else you will never finish anything. And no, there's no 'probably' in that sentence, because it's fact. You will never finish anything - nothing at all - if you don't make yourself do it. If you don't force yourself to keep on producing words through illness, boredom, lack of inspiration, depression and most of all, times when there are all kinds of other calls on your attention which you must ignore.

When I meet people for the first time and they ask what I do, and I tell them 'I'm a writer' there's a comment that I hear time and time again. A comment that I'm so used to now that it doesn't even infuriate me anymore, it just makes me feel tired out.

'Oh, I've always meant to write a book - but I don't have the time'.

What I always want to say (and never do) is, 'Wow, it's a good job I bought all those extra hours at the Time shop then, isn't it?'

Where do these people think the time to write comes from? Do they imagine that we all have trust funds, or that the moment a publishing contract appears we're suddenly millionaires? Do they honestly believe that writers have no lives, no families, no commitments? That we don't have to earn a living, make heart-breaking choices, go without sleep, give up other things that we love, in order to carve out the time to do this?

I get emails from people all the time asking me how to get published, and I usually write back with sound advice about polishing your work, doing research, being persistent. But the real truth is that the way you become a writer is to be willing to make sacrifices for writing's sake.

I've been doing this a few years now, but I'm still not used to it. And on days like this, I wonder if it's worth it at all.