EDITOR’S NOTE: I don’t know what exactly I can say about Cynthia Taylor, except that I urge you to visit www.pinkhairedgirl.com for more of everything Cyn-ful (Aha! I bet that’s the first time that pun has ever been made! Wokka wokka wokka!). Cyn is a full-time student and a part-time ranconteur, and yes, her hair really is that color.

The mythology of writing tells us that Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry while living as a creepy recluse and completely shunning an audience. She instructed her sisters to burn her poems upon her death, wanting to insure that no one else read them. She was an artist, a poet writing only for herself and the love of words.

There is no way in hell I could ever work like that. Unlike Ms. Dickinson, I don’t see the point in writing without readers. (You also can’t sing all of my writing to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas.) I’m a blogger, not a diarist. If a tree falls in a forest, who cares if it makes a sound? Modern scholarship suggests that the whole creepy recluse line may have been a load of hooey with regard to Emily, anyway.

When I was in college, getting a Creative Writing degree, making myself write was easy. I had assignments and deadlines and workshops to write for, and no job to stop me from sitting around in my dorm room and churning out short stories. (Not to mention an eighteen-year-old’s charmingly naive belief in the Importance of said short stories.) At Oberlin, there was a system designed to churn out writing and writers, and while there may be a lot of justified complaints about the workshop system, it did get words on the page.

I had big plans for my life post college. Computer programmer by day, fiction writer by night, I was going to take the world by storm. Instead, I sent out four or five short stories, received four or five rejection letters, and promptly stopped writing. It’s hard, this writing thing. Hard to make time for, hard to keep doing in the face of constant rejection, hard to believe in the importance of words arranged and rearranged on a page. It’s hard just to make a decent sentence. I don’t think the high incidence of alcoholism amongst writers is a coincidence.

(Ponder: The way some sentences spring forth fully fledged, full of truth and beauty, and others are doggedly and insistently awkward, fighting back against your efforts to rearrange them. One of my weaknesses is my inability to get rid of those first sentences, the beautiful ones. My short stories eddy around them, meandering at the expense of plot, because I cannot bear to cut something pretty. I am indulgent in this, and thus you must forgive me this paragraph.)

I have a question for you, my fellow writers. How the hell do you keep doing this? How does this reconcile with jobs, with careers? (I have another life in which I’m a computer science grad student, and I love it just as much.) How do you find the time, but more importantly, the will?