Writing is a Harsh Mistress

by Paul D. Marks
Does your writing ever interfere with your family life? Do the demands of your fiction ever create friction with those closest to you?
The title of this piece, “Writing is a Harsh Mistress,” pretty much answers the question. Yes, writing interferes with family life. It interferes with daily life. The demands of my fiction definitely create friction with the reality of my life and sometimes those close to me.
Most people don’t understand the demands of writing and the need and desire to write, which is akin to a heroin habit. You must have your fix. And one fix leads to another. And one high demands another. If you have some success, you want more. You want to taste it again.
There’s always something more to write, something else to write, a great idea for a new story, or a terrific bit for that scene you’ve been stuck on.
To be honest, writing is like a black hole. It sucks you in and it’s sometimes hard to see the light outside that hole. If I could be fed intravenously and not have to sleep I might never get up from my writing chair. I do, however, get up several times in a session to take the dogs out, walk them, play with them, etc. It’s good for them and makes them happy and it’s good for me, too, to get out of the chair. If I was glued to the chair and the screen, Pepper, when she was younger, would come up and nudge my elbow: time for a walk, Daddy. And I always obliged. She doesn’t do that much anymore, but Buster has kind of taken over those duties. He doesn’t nudge my elbow like she did, but he’ll come and stand and glare at me with those puppy-dog eyes, tell me it’s time to get moving. (On a side note, it always amazes me that even though dogs can’t talk they sure can communicate to us.)
When I worked on a typewriter (remember those?) I often wished that there could be an endless supply of paper (like Jack Kerouac writing on the endless scroll for On the Road) so that I wouldn’t have to change paper at the end of every page, because I’d often lose my train of thought in doing that. So, when computers came out with their endless pages it was a miracle to me. But the downside of that is I truly can sit here for hours and never get up, never take a break.
Often friends and family don’t understand the driving need to write, to express ourselves, and that can cause friction. In the past, particularly before I had any kind of success and was hungry and desperate, I sometimes turned down friends who wanted to get together for a movie or dinner because I wanted to write. I wanted to find success, so I sacrificed other things to that desire. I know in at least a couple of cases I lost those friendships because of that.
Other things suffer as well–sometimes doing the dishes or dusting. Well, let them suffer. But what else suffers is that I seldom or never have time to play guitar. Hobbies suffer: I collect things, toys, Beatles stuff, movie stuff, other things, and I have little to no time to play with any of that. A lot is sacrificed to The Writing.
But I am very lucky to have Amy, my wife, who understands my need to write and also helps me with it. She’s a damn good editor. And she’s pretty tolerant of my writing mistress. Which is not to say there aren’t times when she wants me to quit for the day or do something else on a particular day. But in the big picture she’s very understanding.
First published on the Criminal Minds, a Virtual Panel blog on November 29, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

Paul D. Marks is the author of the Shamus Award-Winning mystery-thriller White Heat. His short story “Ghosts of Bunker Hill” was voted #1 in the 2016 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Poll. “Windward” was selected for the Best American Mystery Stories of 2018, was nominated for the Shamus Award, and won the 2018 Macavity Award for Best Short Story. His stories have also been published in Beat to a Pulp, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Hardboiled, Switchblade, Mystery Weekly, Mysterical-E and more. He has also served on the board of Sisters in Crime/L.A. in the past and currently serves on the board of the SoCal chapter of MWA.