La vita della scrittrice ... What does it really mean to live a writer's life?

Not being a machine, I seem to require time and inspiration and energy and relationships and pauses and ebbs and flows and swells and emotions and changes ...

Jul 08, 2024

Buongiorno! I am not in Italy but I’m having a moment of wishing that I were although I love San Francisco and the life that I have here. So, I sit here with my caffe in my pigiama thinking about la vita della scrittrice. The writer’s life. The life I’ve been living for over two decades if you count it by being paid for it and over four decades if you count it by simply the act of doing it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this life lately. About what it meant to me when I first started and what it might mean to me now. About whether it is something I am, something I do, something else …

Lately, I’ve recommitted myself to seeing if I can fall in love with the act of writing, if I can romance the writing a little bit, if I can deepen this relationship. As I wrote in a writing group earlier this month:

I don’t want to keep loving writing like I keep loving certain family members just because they are family. I don’t want to love blindly without seeing who my lover really is. I don’t want to love writing out of obligation or habit. I don’t want to feel like “I love you but I don’t like you.”

Sometimes what I want is that honeymoon period but four decades into this marriage with words, that’s not what this is. And yet … I believe in love that lasts for decades, for over a century even, that reinvents itself. I believe you can ask your partner over and over “who are you now and who are you now and who are you now?” and if you’re open to the answer, the love that can flourish between you is so great it creates entire worlds. I am in the process of asking my writing: “tell me, who are you now, I truly want to know.”

When the writer actually was in Italy a few years ago

But the tricky thing about the writing life is that if you want to be honest with it and let it change and evolve and take time like this, you have to figure out a way to support it. So, I’ve been changing up my income streams - taking on gigs that don’t excite me but also don’t sap my energy for creativity, tapping into the last of my savings, applying for grants, applying for food stamps (again, although I was denied because come fall I’ll be a full-time student and in short that means I don’t qualify) … In this writing life I long always for just enough money to support my dreams, ambitions, goals, efforts, routine, imagination, development, commitment, community-growing, research, history, future.