You may be right…I may be crazy

…but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for…Or so the song goes. Something a fellow writer said to me today made me think about why we write – or why I write, anyway. Chaste Foxxe said, We all must be crazy.

Crazy to keep at it after we get rejection notices. Crazy to stay up way past bed time when the muse strikes us, or get up in the middle of the night to finish a scene. Crazy because when the voices talk, we not only listen, we take notes.

Mostly, crazy because, as I replied to Chaste, we muddle our way through a business where we have no guideposts. Sure there are tons of how-to manuals on writing. There are support groups, classes, conferences, seminars – but there’s no formula for success. What works for one author will not work for another. There are authors out there who have broken every rule and still succeeded and there are authors out there who have suffered for minor infractions of those same rules. It’s a wheel of fortune and we just keep spinning.

I write because I can’t not write. I go crazy when I don’t. The scenes pile up in my head when they have nowhere to go. Sometimes they don’t make it to paper as quickly and completely as I’d like them to, but that doesn’t stop me. I’m easily distracted – oh look, a bunny! I procrastinate with my WIP because that’s what we writers do. But I never stop. I keep writing because there’s so much to tell.

Is it a form of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results – by clinical definition, yes. We’re crazy, but we love it…and we’re not alone in our craziness so that makes it okay.