I feel like hiring a private detective to find out where February and March disappeared to, and preferably one that resembles Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. It seems like last week I was coming back from Christmas vacation feeling not as refreshed and prepared as I'd hoped and suddenly my short form proposal for my thesis is due, my forty page portfolio for my prose workshop is needing to be filled and my final paper for the course that prompted this blog is looming like like a thunderstorm, imminent and ready to engulf my free time. What is different about grad school, however, is that so far I have loved every essay and project I have had to do this year. There are fewer of them, and they are worth more, but they are also closer to my heart and pertain to subject matters that I find vastly more fascinating than those of my undergrad. This, I think, makes it all worth it.
However, even in the midst of such projects I still need to take little breaks and read something else for a few minutes when I feel like I'm flagging. I came across this post and found it hugely edifying. Neil Gaiman is and has been one of my favorites, if not my favorite author since the age of twelve. He has spanned the mediums of novels, short stories, films, children's books and graphic novels and his is a career that I have aspired to follow. He reminded me of Roald Dahl in that I could tell he was having fun writing what he did, and that enjoyment spilled out onto the page. That was the moment I realized I wanted to be a writer. I am a very private person and the idea of celebrity-level fame repulses me. But the idea that you could spend your life doing something that was intrinsically fun for both you and your audience appealed to me more than anything else had.
The post articulates something that I have felt for some time. I have heard time and time again that serial writers are "irresponsible, lazy, selfish " and a myriad of other narrow-minded insults simply because they fail to produce the next installment of their work by the time it was expected. This frustrates me to no end. Anyone who has spent their time writing can tell you that to find time to write amongst the demands of daily life, be it on a thesis, a paper, a story, a poem/collection of poems and so on will tell you that there are always distractions, always pressing demands on your time. "But that's their job!" the readership cries. "That's what we're paying them to do!"
Gaiman articulates this particularly well in response to a few questions from a reader with related concerns: the writer does not work for you. They have a life, they have multiple deadlines and sometimes both get in the way. The advent of blogs have been both positive and negative for writers, as it allows a connection between author and reader, but it also allows for closer scrutiny of the author's actions. I think that it is unfair to assume that by making one's life as a writer that they should spend all of their time on their projects and forsake their personal time. There is a similar parallel in the university sphere: students e-mail their profs at 3am asking for extensions for a project due the next and get pissed when the prof doesn't answer them promptly. When a professor goes home, I believe they should have the right to have their personal time just like any one else. It is a job, and one many of them love dearly, but that does not mean that they should devote every waking minute to its demands. Likewise, while writers do have deadlines and contracts, these must sometimes be broken due to the unpredictability of life and the last thing we should do is condemn them for it.
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