This Is What A Writer Needs

What a writer needs is the same thing that an only child has grown accustomed to:

A little bit of solitude, and a little bit of space.

This looks like nothing but a lifestyle to me though.

For a writer needs a writing life.

Spending the day reading and writing, taking the dog for a walk, maybe taking a nap, maybe a mid-day shower – nothing much sounds better.

This Danish aristocrat had it pretty good too though.

Virginia Wolf said that all a writer needed was a room and money.

I have no idea how some writers work in newsrooms.

We may be halfway through a novel, an essay, a story, or a memoir or we may be nearing the finish line on a piece that has taken us years. But wherever we are in our work, we have never been exactly here, today. Today, we need to relearn what it is that we do. We have to remind ourselves to be patient, gentle with our foibles, ruthless with our time, withstanding of our frustrations. We remember what it is that we need. The solitude of an empty home, a walk through the woods, a bath, or half an hour with a good book—the echo of well-formed sentences in our ears. Whatever it takes to begin again.

-Dani Shapiro, Still Writing