When are you going to quit writing?

 

One of my often overlooked books 
and the only collection of short stories I have
Available on Kindle for ninety-nine cents.

The question startled me. It came from my son’s friend, a man in his early fifties who retired two years ago. After a long minute, I replied, “I don’t think much about that.” I suppose turnabout is fair play because I had asked him what he was doing these days. My thought, which probably showed, was that fifty is far too young to bow out of the working world. His response was, “If I was working, I couldn’t do what I’m doing.” I didn’t pursue it, but I’ve thought a lot since about his question. When am I going to quite writing?

I’ve been writing since I was about eight and wrote my first short stories on a small pad of lined paper. In high school, I submitted a short story to Seventeen, but it came back so rapidly that, as the late Texas author Elmer Kelton would have said, “it must have had a rubber band on it.” When I was out of graduate school and home with babies, my song was, “I’d write if I knew what to write.” I did some free-lance pieces and even scored one in McCall’s about adoption. My first novel was published as young-adult fiction in 1978 and for too many years I was pigeon-holed as a y/a author.

In 2010 I retired as director of TCU Press. Over my working years I had produced a fairly respectable body of work in terms of quantity if not quality. I wrote fiction and nonfiction for adults and young adults, book reviews, a couple of columns with short runs, books for school libraries, short stories. I wrote whatever would pay. I didn’t really retire eleven years ago—I just sort of switched focus and became a full-time author.

It didn’t take long to establish a routine that still shapes my days—I work at my desk from about eight until around two. Then it’s nap time and my real working day is pretty much over. In the late afternoon, I play on social media and frequently cook dinner for my family. After dinner, I may read, write a blog, or just explore on the computer. It’s a daily routine that makes me happy.

I write because I cannot not write. Writing, they tell us, is a business, and we must treat it as such. But it is to me more than a job. It’s a way of life. It’s not only what I do but who I am. No, I never made the bestseller lists and truth be told all I earned was “walking around money,” but I have people who write me that they enjoyed my books, countless notes from schoolchildren, enough feedback to make me feel that I am contributing something to the world (that’s something I worry about a lot). Writing gives me purpose in life (raising four kids definitely did that too! I have always said my tombstone should read that I was a mother, an author, and a publisher—in that order.).

I have enough projects on my desk and in my mind to keep me busy for two or three years. Whenever I get near the point of wondering, “What shall I write next,” I revert to worrying about a memoir. I have lots of stories to tell, but sometimes I think I’m overwhelmed by the idea of organizing them. There are days when I think I’ll cherry pick from blogs I’ve done over the past fifteen years and compile them into a memoir. But then I’d have to choose a theme—personal life and children, writing, cooking?

I suppose the day will come when the words I put on paper don’t make sense—or at least don’t carry as much impact as I hope they do now. And I may well be too tired to sit at a desk for six hours. I already notice that I am much less driven than I was ten years ago, and I think not writing will come as a slow progression rather than a sudden stop on a pre-announced day. But I don’t spend much time thinking about it. I’ve got writing to do.