I have never had a truly chosen career. First and foremost, there was motherhood and then homeschooling all three of them. And then came a business partnership with my husband which was much like how we “planned” our children:  one day I woke up and found out I was “with business”. No one was more surprised than me how wonderful, endless, gratifying, stressful and fun either children or business could be.

We have been lucky/blessed/rewarded: the kids come back to visit and not just for the free food and beer. And business has grown on me and it actually pays me, so there’s that.

But writing, willing my butt into the chair every day, this comes at me comically, it is so ridiculously hard, with no promise ever of reward. Every day, I ask myself to what end am I doing this? I scan lists of Pulitzer Prize winners and New York Times Best Sellers and I think I must be crazy. I have only really written for myself, and there was that $10 per column run I had with the local paper fifteen years ago, the weekly discipline of which sent me over the edge, or at least running back to the safe parameters of balancing Quicken, baking muffins and breaking up fights among my ruffians.

Those things were immediate and right before me. I knew what to do. In fact, it was downright easy in how I knew how to do them. But writing? Half the time I don’t know where I’m going with something or what I’m writing it for. Much of writing is just practice, practice, practice: following that prompt, free-writing, morning pages, stream-of-consciousness – all things to prime the pump. Like a panhandler who sifts the sand for days, weeks, years, I write to find the nugget of gold. Sometimes you are sitting on a gold mine, but more often it’s the return every day to comb through the muck to find that one small nugget. It’s consistency that will unveil both the nugget and the vein.

The stuff I crank out every day is crap. Pretty much. Anne Lamott has coined an apt phrase for this: the “shitty first draft”. The point being that you have to write something and then, from something you can write something better. But something better will not come from nothing. Writing is part discipline, part endless slogging through the muck and part divination as you peer into the sludge you’ve contrived of your own accord and glimpse that something that has potential. And that has to be what gets me back to the chair the next day.