It's a secret....

I've been saying to myself for a while that I'd love to be able to make a living without having to write. The concept being that I would then stop writing altogether and wait patiently to see what (if anything) eventually moved me to start up again. I had begun to suspect that I had only kept on doing it for at least the last couple of decades because it was the only thing anyone was willing to pay me to do.

When I started to get work as a critic in my twenties, first in Maine and then in Boston and Los Angeles, I was happy to be able to stop working in stores and restaurants, to say "So long, suckers" and saunter off to do something that seemed like fun; that I had been doing on my own in my spare time. But over the years it has been ground down into a chore. I hardly ever look forward to doing it anymore. Nowadays I put much less energy into writing than into making up excuses to avoid writing.

A couple of years ago I drove up to San Francisco to interview the wonderfully charming and ridiculously prolific novelist and screenwriter Ni Kuang. When I marveled at the obvious delight he still took in his work and confessed, as one writer to another (an old school interviewing move), that while I was sometimes pleased to look at a finished piece and realize that I had written it, the actual writing was always an unpleasant struggle, Ni sifu beamed at me like a kindly uncle: "That's because you haven't found your niche."

It was not my place to fill him in on exactly how old I was, or to go into detail about the many different forms of writing I'd tried over the years that had not turned out to be my "niche." But I've returned to that thought many times; wondering if I got off on the wrong foot thinking of myself as some sort of reclusive intellectual when I get antsy almost instantly sitting at a desk and am not even all that smart.

Can people live out most of a life operating on a false assumption? God only knows. More on these and other more cheerful subjects in the weeks and months ahead.