I’m beginning to see (after thirty years) that learning how to write is like learning how to put your baby to sleep, or keep your marriage happy, something that can’t be accomplished by following rules, even though the rules calm us down and help us stay in the maelstrom.

Let’s stay with that baby. People become rabid on the topic of how to get the baby to sleep, largely because it’s the first unpredicted moment of parenting– this force of nature, drilling itself relentlessly into the quiet hours of your night, depriving you of peace daily, hourly, until you are bleary and bloodshot and possibly psychotic, and you begin to understand that you are going to have to do this same thing for eighteen years unless you get the baby under control. So you read the books, and the books say, warningly, never touch the baby, or it will never learn to stop crying. Or: sleep with the baby, or it will grow up socially impaired. Or: whatever you do, don’t give the baby mixed messages, because then it will cry and be socially impaired. Each book layers a thin skin of hope over a cold kernel of certainty: you will not be able to follow any of these instructions. You are one big walking mixed message, a mixed message billboard. Your baby is going to grow up demanding, psychotic and omnipotent, while you go slowly insane. One day during this dark period of my life I read, like a voice in the wilderness, a person who said, here’s our rule: chef’s surprise. What we do with our baby on any given night depends on our mood, the baby’s mood, and how things go. In other words, there are no rules. There are ways. And you can try all of them without fear.

This is also true for writing. One day you will think, this is the best way, and the next day it will fail. Or, you might be like Trollope and wake up every single day for the rest of your life and do the same thing, without wavering, like one of those self-winding watches. When I first started writing I interviewed two famous writers because I was so desperate to figure out how it worked. I wasn’t interested in story, or metaphor, or character. I wanted to know, literally, what writers do every day. What kind of clothes you wear, where you sit, how you pay your bills and what happens when your mother calls asking you to meet the UPS guy at her house because you don’t have a job. They gave me two completely different answers. Lanford Wilson chased butterflies around his lush garden, ate pints of ice cream for dinner and wrote plays in wild twenty-day stretches. Richard Nelson woke up, put on a suit and tie, left his apartment and came back in after buying a cup of coffee on the corner, as if he were going to an office. You need to find your way. Try not to be intimidated by the guy who chases butterflies, if that’s not your thing, and don’t put on a suit if it drains you of hope. Some of the ways are pretty straightforward: nothing will happen if you don’t make words on a regular basis. Maybe a gush of words several times a year, or daily words, maybe ten words or ten thousand. The only truth is, if you never write, nothing can happen. Try to write words. And you should probably read some words that other people have written.

People who give advice make life appear pristine: march steadily from the imagined outcome to the successful outcome. So I imagine a pristine solution: write every day for three hours without fail. Then I fail. And then, mercifully, somebody says “people always say they write every day, but nobody does.” I try to remind myself: do my best.

My friend Michael Hauge has an optimistic understanding of character development: characters don’t change randomly in a story, from a person who liked banking into a person who likes music, or a person with fear to a person with courage. They move gravitationally, towards a fuller expression of their (ignored, forsaken) true self.

What I have been doing: chewing compulsively through writer blogs— writers talking to each other, talking about writing, talking about their books, writers giving helpful advice. Most of them make me want to quit. Stephen King writes a nearly perfect book about writing and after reading it I’m ready to hang it up for good. Everything he says makes him seem so much smarter than I could ever hope to be, intimidatingly smart, his homey, small town dialect notwithstanding. And then he writes, if you aren’t enjoying yourself, don’t write.

My chest caves in with despair and lack of air. Some writers enjoy doing this. (Why? Because they were well-liked as children? Because they aren’t perfectionists? Because they have such huge egos they actually believe perfection can be attained, or has been attained, by them? Because they have practiced long enough? Because they have Aspberger’s?) However it happened, writing is so much fun for them that when they aren’t writing they share helpful tips, starting with, writing should be fun.

I am blessed to have a peaceful marriage, to a person that I really, truly, love. Steady, daily love, the good stuff, a person I am glad to see every morning after more than thirty years. I don’t have the same juju with writing, which turns out to be the great, unrequited love of my life. Every day has felt stolen, wrestled, cajoled, torn, cobbled. Every day I ask myself, should I have been a therapist? A teacher? A lawyer? I keep trying to change, but in the end, that’s the writer I turned out to be. Stephen King writes because he can’t not write, because he enjoys writing too much to stop. I fight to write, every day, against relentless doubts and fears. I write like somebody leaning into strong headwinds, trying to make it home without a coat or a compass. I write lost, and frostbitten, and terrified— when I am not hiding under my covers, taking a nap, planning alternate careers. I am not brimming with stories. I am a slow drip. I answer no to every “You are a writer if…” question on every internet quiz I have ever taken.

But still. There are all these years. I’m still here. Could we count those years for something?

I want to say, to myself, to all those other writers who might be out there, tormented and tongue-tied, not having fun, dreams buried under too many obligations and distractions and negative self talk: don’t give up. You’re still here.

A practice. What is a practice. A practice, I am learning from yoga, is something you do regularly, that changes, and your relationship to it changes, and you keep doing it, whether or not you feel the same way about it today as you felt yesterday. Like any relationship, the feelings are strong and fleeting. If you used the feelings as the only compass you would be quickly lost. How can it be that you fall so hard in love with a person, certain that this person is the one you were meant to be with, the one made for you, and then one day later, or fourteen years later, it’s gone in a wink, all those feelings, and in its place, as with J and L, is fear, and dread, and rage? I fall in love with yoga, I realize that doing it makes me feel centered, keeps me reverent and alert. I sign up for a year of it, thinking, yes, this is my practice. Suddenly it looks kind of raggy around the edges. Is this really what I want? Is this really worth doing every day? It’s so dull. It takes so much time. And who the hell is this weird guy, talking to me about breathing, and holding my shoulder blades back and down?

So practice. Practice is riding that out, until the next feeling arrives, and blooms, and passes, and the next. Sometimes the feelings will be tempting and intoxicating, places you want to stay a long time, this feeling of being strong, or peaceful, but those feelings pass, and then you are bored, or nauseated, or tired, or irritated. You think, why did I make a commitment to this? Look at all these people. Why in the world are they here?