In Confessions I told you how I’d chased greatness – and failed. My most sacred ambition remained out of reach and it hadn’t been due to lack of trying. I had a stack of completed manuscripts and a shoe box full of rejection slips. It’s only fair to admit, however, that it wasn’t only the sheer abundance of failure that drove me to hang it up.

I had health problems – lots of them. All the nights of writing, smoking, and fueling the muse with various concoctions had left me looking – and feeling – like my first truck after I drove it into a ditch. I had a permanent cough and a mouth full of rotten teeth. My stomach rejected solid food on a regular basis. Inevitably, I landed in the hospital. It was there that I really faced the truth.

My dream was killing me!

I spent a little time in mourning and then learned how to not be a writer. I did all the things that young adults do; went to school, found full-time work with steady pay, earned promotions, took more classes, etc. I made up for lost time and built a quality life. Story ideas still found me. They circled in the ether like vultures on the scent of carrion. I ignored them… And then wondered why my comfortable little life felt empty and false.

The answer, of course, was that I’d built only half a life. I needed both the sanity of the adult world and the insanity of creativity to feel complete. I needed the internal chaos of ideas bursting inside of me and running rampant. It scared the hell out of me, but I saw no other option. I bought a journal and wrote on the first page, “This time will be different.”

I shed the immature notions of what I envisioned a writer to be and treated writing like a second job. I went to workshops and critique session instead of skid row bars. I rarely told people that I was working on something. I still wore black, but only because I liked it. The new lifestyle turned out to be a much more gratifying way of pursing writing. I made lots of writer friends and my non-writing life never suffered.

However, I still got nowhere.

Several writers I knew pulled out ahead of me and launched nice careers. What secret knowledge, I wondered, did they have? More importantly, how did they get it? This gave me a new quest. I forgot about getting published and concentrated on learning the secrets. Writing stopped being my second job and became full-time school after work.

I ran back to the mentors of my youth. I was no longer precocious so a few had less patience for me. Still, they shared what they could. They explained what they meant by, “Promising but, uh, lacking all focus and direction.” Other mentors were happy that I’d survived and screwed my head on properly. One of them told me, “You’re all grown up now , well, except for those shoes…” Then he told me what he knew. This time I listened to them. I took notes, studied, pondered and ultimately accepted their knowledge as truth.

What they taught me wasn’t theory. It had nothing to do with art or what a writer should be. It was simply the truth.

Now I’m telling you:

Writing is nothing more than basic competencies built upon craft which can become art. Writing is concept, conflict and character in scenes that occur at the right time while surrounded by theme. If these elements exist within a powerful voice, that’s even better. That, my friends, is the long and drawn out way of saying that good writing arises from and contains direction and focus.

That’s it. That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned and, while it may not sound like much, it took me half my life to see.

I hope you see it now, this instant, with no wasted years behind you and no abandoned manuscripts in a box. I hope you embrace the study of writing rather than the romantic idea of being a writer. I hope you never waste a single hour on any of the nonsense and that you make the distance between you and your writer’s life a short and happy one.

More to come. LL