I’m Restless Therefore I Write

My husband and I headed to my parents’ on Sunday to celebrate Easter. It was just the four of us – my mom, my dad, my husband and I – and it got me thinking about how different Easter has been over the last several years, not only because of the pandemic. Last year, during the height of the lockdown, my husband and I visited our neighboring town of Clinton and just walked around by the water. The two years before that, we went to his aunts’ to visit his family and the four years before that it was my aunt and uncles’. Before that, I spent every Easter at my grandmother’s enjoying a very traditional Easter in which our entire immediate family would come whether they technically celebrated or not. In those days, my cousins and I all saw each other often, not only on holidays and we’d spend long hours together, watching movies or even filming movies of our own. I’d even bring my computer along and, if I got the chance, I’d write.

Writing, for me, was different in those days. As a beginner writer, I was learning the craft and it was sometimes hard for me to pull away from what I was doing as I struggled to take what was in my head and make it sound as good as the pros did. I worked, full time, for someone besides myself and there were weeks when I barely got to write at all, leaving me feeling particularly desperate when the weekend rolled around for that sacred time inside my own head. Though my preferred writing desk was a quiet seat in front of a babbling brook, I quickly learned to adapt to any and all situations and gratefully accepted any opportunity to write I could get. Occasionally that meant writing on major holidays and, at the time, that didn’t seem all that strange to me and, in fact, normal.

I remember hearing someplace that Nora Roberts was quoted for saying I can’t be happy if I’m not writing. Though I wasn’t able to find any reference to the quote when I attempted to research it, I remember my reaction to hearing it well because I still think about it often. The truth is, I hate the thought that my happiness could be dependent on writing when there are so many wonderful blessings in my life. A person’s happiness should never be dependent on any one thing and I even took a long break from writing when I was planning my wedding, and used the opportunity to see how I’d fair if I was no longer making writing a part of my everyday life. But, in time, I got restless. And an urge to get back inside my stories became a full blown obsession once again as creativity kicked back into high gear and the ideas started flowing faster than ever.

Writing, for me, is a form of constant entertainment. When I’m dwelling on the negativity in the world or I simply need a distraction, I spend a few hours writing and my entire perspective shifts. I’m never not “into” a story because I’m the one creating it and if for some reason the words aren’t keeping me on the edge of my seat, I scrap them, or better yet, I adjust them and polish them until they shine. We all get restless sometimes. For writers, it’s a given. Thankfully, I know the perfect remedy to restlessness. And with an infinite number of imaginative possibilities in my mind and at my fingertips, it never does get old.