“So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?” ~ Norah Ephron (via Kathleen Kelly), You’ve Got Mail

One of the most annoying things I’ve ever been told is that I’m not a writer if I’m not writing every day. This gem of wisdom was handed to me, around six years ago, by a guy who used to come in and work on his writing when I worked as a barista at my local Starbucks. Years later, as I finish up my first novel, I began pondering his pronouncement and realized how ridiculously wrong that kind of statement is.

I was in community college at the time, part-time, working at the coffee shop, and traveling. He asked me what I wanted to do one day, and I said I was a writer, and that I was working on my first novel. I confessed that, if all went well, I’d like that to be my vocation.

He immediately, and sharply, asked how many hours a day I spent writing. I replied that it was zero at the moment, but that the book was being worked on in different ways. Mentally turned over, again and again, hit from different angles when I was out hiking, driving, working or exercising. He shook his head, as most people several decades older than you, who spend their days in a Starbucks, are want to do, and said, “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. You’re not a writer. Writers write. If you’re not filling up notebooks everyday with stories and essays, then you’re not a writer. You won’t be one until you do that.”

I told him I had a blog that I wrote on everyday. I carried a quotebook around with me everywhere I went and wrote down observations and poetry and prose… whatever crept into my head and pounced on my synapses as I was out and about. He shook his head again. Told me that I needed to be doing writer’s exercises and writing stories and working for at least five hours a day and then, and only then, would I be able to one day write my book. I countered, inbetween making beverages for customers, that I’d been writing since I was 12. I’d written two books (neither of them anything to brag about) by fifteen and thousands of poems and short stories. But at that moment, in 2004, it was the time to casually write. I was focusing on living.

The older gentleman shook his head again and looked at me sadly, and pronounced his judgment, “You’re not a writer then. A writer never stops writing. A writer can’t. We’re addicted. And if we don’t write, we’re reading. If you can live your life without doing either, then writing is just not in you.”

To that, six years later, as I finish the novel that I’ve been working on for seven years, I have a hearty, well-thought out reply:

Bullshit.

Yes. Some writers do live by the creed the man in the coffee shop tried to foist on me (him, as well as countless others I’ve met). But that’s not for me. A storyteller has to go out and live life. Reading and writing (a lot) are necessary to write well. But a great writer isn’t just a wordsmith. A great writer is also a storyteller, and the only way to find stories to tell is to live. Now, coffee shop writer was right about what a good writer does. A good writer writes all the time. Every day, every week, every month and every year. When they aren’t writing, they’re reading. And they have a great grasp of prose, an excellent handle on grammar and man, do they ever know what narrative forms are “in” at the moment. But what do they have to say?

If one stays in doors, writing and reading every single day, then what do they know of life? Good literature is full of universals that connect humanity. Literary fiction is composed of truths that dig at the soul of the reader. I don’t know how someone who isn’t out there in the real world LIVING claims to get these things on an instinctive-enough level to be able to make their readers feel it. My only guess is that they’re copying what other authors have had to say on love, life, loss, death, greed, failure, etc. Because if you’re not out there, risking your heart, getting it broken, traveling the world, getting in fights, getting knocked down and bouncing back, then what is there to say?

I’ve been hard at work on my book The Ashes for the last year. It’s been in development for a full 7 years, but come on. Don’t tell me I haven’t been working on it for the better part of a decade because it’s only been 13 months that I’ve spent chained to my laptop. The characters, the setting, the plot and many other details were all things I wrestled with fiercely on treadmills, forest paths, trains in England, classrooms and yes, behind the counter at the local Starbucks. And they changed as I did. Things happened to me in my life that affected the plot, the characters and the overall meaning of this book. Being out in the world NOT WRITING has made this book as emotionally-charged and powerful as I, and the several who have read it thus far, think that it is.

Ernest Hemingway, by the by, agrees with this particular line of thought:

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know i had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.” (Preface to The Short Stories, Scribner Classics)

I am the FIRST to admit that I don’t have the greatest grasp on grammar. I can work hard at it, sharpen my prose and edit like crazy though. I know that there are thousands of better writers out there in the world. But here’s the thing that Hemingway and I are getting at: it’s better to be a good storyteller, to have stories to tell from actual experience, than to be a first-rate writer. A storyteller can finesse his experience and his story into something. I was a great storyteller before I could write (ie child who makes stuff up). I learned, over the years, to be a good writer. But being a gifted storyteller and writer doesn’t matter at all if my ideas, my convictions, and my world-view are untested. Being talented has nothing to do with writing something that will matter to someone else. If you’re not living, you have nothing original to say and that is not who I want to be. If that works for coffee shop writer guy, than glory be to him. But there are a lot of people propagating this myth that if you want to be a writer, than you should write, every minute of every day and if you’re not doing that, then read.

And of course, I am ardent lover of both writing and reading. I read like crazy and have always defined myself by being a bookworm. But that’s not all I do. Not every year. Sure I’m a bibliophile. And many books not only shaped me as I grew up, but often as a child, were my only trustworthy friends. I’d even go so far as to say that the stories I read in the classics saved my life and gave me the courage to be a writer. I wouldn’t be a writer without having first been a reader. But reading and writing wouldn’t matter a damn to me at all unless I was out living life, willing to occasionally put down the pen and the paper and see what is out there.

This last year has been a heavy writing and reading season for me. If you’d like, you can read through a sampling of the books I’ve read over the last couple years while finishing my novel, here on indiebound.com’s list feature. But this period of writing and reading was preceded by more than a decade of weird, crazy, heartbreaking and amazing experiences that inform who I am, and what and why I write. I’ve lived out of a van. I faced down a grizzly bear on a cliff face in Tahoe. I’ve run beneath emerald green funnel clouds. I’ve made idiotic decisions, heroic stands and gotten the shit kicked out of me for good intentions. I think every experience like that has shaped me as a writer and a reader, even though, in order to have those experiences, I wasn’t writing or reading all the time.

So to the coffee shop writer guy, and anyone else out there who feels they need to tell people who they are and how to approach what they are passionate about: Suck it. The only truth worth passing around is that we all only have ONE LIFE to live. Whether you’re an artist or a plumber or a politician, making sure that life is well-spent and lived in full, outside your claimed profession, will always make you better at what you do during the day.

Go on road trips. Have adventures. Get to know people even if it scares you to do so. Love people even when the person you love doesn’t deserve it. Learn things, not the hard way, but the honest, in-your-face way. And if you happen to be an artist, like me, you’ll create better art that’s closer to the raw real life and understand great works like you never had before.

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