By Julia Cameron
We put a lot of bunk around the notion of being a writer. We make a big deal out of putting words on paper instead of simply releasing them to the air. We have a mythology that tells us that writing is a torturous activity. Believing that, we don’t even try it or, if we do, and if we find it unexpectedly easy, we stop, freeze up and tell ourselves that whatever it is that we’re doing, it can’t be “real” writing.
By real writing we mean the kind we have all the mythology about. We mean the kind that does not involve scenarios like the one I had tonight: a dinner with my good friend Dori, watching Il Postino on video afterward, kissing Dori good-bye when it was still mid-evening, and strolling into my study to write just a little while little dog Maxwell curls at my feet.
There is something too casual, too effortless, too normal about this kind of writer’s life. It too closely resembles everyone else’s life—just with some writing sandwiched in. Why, if this is how a writer lives, lots of us could do it. If the suffering is actually optional, if writing needn’t be an antisocial activity.
What if there were no such thing as a writer? What if everyone simply wrote? What if there were no “being a real writer” to aspire to? What if writing were simply about the act of writing?
