Life vs Writing About It

For about a decade, I traveled the world full-time, writing about the places I lived and the people I met while making my living from the resultant books, essays, and articles.

There’s a tension in this sort of effort, as time spent writing is time not spent exploring a new city, meeting new people, having adventures, and generally acquiring more grist for the word-mill.

On the flip side of that, spending all of one’s time wandering and eating and chit-chatting with strangers is an excellent way to expand one’s horizons, but a terrible way to pay the rent and build one’s authorial résumé.

All sorts of writers face some version of this tension.

Folks who write journalistically need to be reporting, researching, and analyzing in addition to (at some point) typing out a bunch of words related to all that effort.

Fiction writers lean heavily on their imaginations, but their manifestations are informed and fed by knowledge, know-how, and experiences they’ve had (or which they’ve gleaned from others).

Writers are alchemists of datum and qualia who convert the actual into the potential, and who weave disparate strands of information into holistic, linguistic tapestries.

The act of sitting down and typing (or handwriting if you prefer) is part of the job, then, but our real work as writers is figuring out how to balance the soaking up of information with its conversion into something original—and ideally, us-shaped.