I feel the tug of people's reactions when I told them I was a journalist, not some bureaucrat or corporate slave. Most of all, I miss finding the perfect adjective or the wittiest phrase from my internal encyclopedia to finish a sentence.
Ask an artist why he or she does anything to create their art and they will come up with explanations that often baffle the questioner. Especially if he or she must answer questions like: Do you know how your novel will end in advance?
The sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the modern essay, once remarked that "there are more books upon books than upon a...
Maybe drifting is part of the writing process; maybe the time spent doing anything other than writing is as important to the writing as actually sitting down and doing it.
I have it on good authority that starting tomorrow we'll "share" our content on our iphones for no advance. People will say things like "I guess I'll write a book" and no one will find it unusual.