Strange Writing Questions: Answered
A friend interrogated me about my job. I’m re-sharing what I told her here.
I write for a living. People find this more fascinating than it is.
As I’ve written about in the past, writing is hard. It’s also a lonely endeavor. One that forces you to be something of a hermit, obsessed with a specific topic for weeks or months (or even years, in my case) on end until you release the work into the world.
But still, people think it’s cool. For example, I recently had dinner who grilled me about writing and my process. I figured I’d share what we talked about.
Q: What do you eat/drink to keep yourself charged throughout a writing day?
A: Diet soda. Too much of it. It’s my vice. The combination of fiz and sweet and a low level of caffeine keeps my fingers hitting the keys. When I spent more than a month in the Arctic backcountry reporting my book, The Comfort Crisis, I missed three things: my wife, my dogs, and diet soda.
Q: How do you solve writer’s block?
A: Firemen don’t get “firefighter’s block.” Nurses don’t get “nurse’s block.” Somedays the words come easy. Other days they don’t. On the latter days I remind myself how lucky I am to be doing what I love and that most jobs don’t get to use the excuse of “(insert job) block” to shirk work. So I accept each…
