Keep the Literary Faith

It's easy to get down on your writing efforts. To let things slide to the point that you wake up one day and realize you haven't written in weeks, months. The manuscript you've been working on is collecting dust, and you find yourself brainlessly answering friends' and family's inescapable inquires into "How's the book coming?" with a pathetic, zombified "It's coming." But, you're lying. It's not coming.

Let's band together to keep the literary faith. We must. We sit in our offices, at our kitchen tables, at the back booth of Panera alone, wandering the dark corridors of our psyches, opening doors, peering in at the memories and impressions heaped up, the treasures of a sentimental horder, in the darkest corners of our subconscious. We must keep the faith, keep writing, and keep connected.

In her essay "Better and Sicker," writer Loorie Moore writes:

Obviously one must keep a certain amount of literary faith, and not be afraid to travel with one's work into margins and jungles and danger zones, and one should also live with someone who can cook and who will both be with one and leave one alone. But there is no formula, to the life or to the work, and all any writer finally knows are the little decisions he or she has been forced to make, given the particular choices. There's no golden recipe. Most things literary are stubborn as colds; they resist all formulas - a chemist's, a wet nurse's, a magician's. Finally, there is no formula outside the sick devotion to the work. Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer - for there's something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity - to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing.

I write; you write; we write.
Keep the literary faith, friends.