Life Ain’t Fair and Writers Gotta Write

By C. L. Beck

My last blog had a statement that I’d like to follow up on: Life ain’t fair and Writers gotta write.

If life were fair, things would be different. All important phone calls would happen as we finish writing for the day, not as we start. We’d never have typos; our first draft would be perfect. There’d be no delete key on our keyboard.

Most of all, our mothers would be our biggest fans. They’d announce to the world how talented we are instead of making subtle comments like, “Why do you waste your time writing, when you could earn a decent living playing the Jet-Puffed Marshmallow Man? Why can’t you be like your brother, Bill, who plays the Pillsbury Dough Boy? He’s successful!”

(Okay, I’ll admit it—my mom never really made that comment. She’s never had the chance because I’ve never had the nerve to tell her that I write.)

Writers are an optimistic bunch. Either that or we’re brain dead, because no matter how unfair life is, no matter how many rejections we get, we still keep doing the same thing. Over and over again, we write. We’re driven to put words down on paper, no matter whether someone will ever buy them or not. We dream of the six figure contract, but until it comes we often write for free. Yes, you heard that correctly. A writer’s gotta write, and even if no one pays us, we just keep clicking that ol’ keyboard anyway.

Non-writers may think that makes us a candidate for psychotherapy and surely Freud would have had something interesting to say about it. Thank goodness he’s dead. No doubt it was his mother’s words that killed him. “Sigmund, why are you wasting your time analyzing minds, when you could be earning a decent living as a barber? Look at your brother, Otto, who designs bombs. He’s successful!”