This morning I am thinking about the work of art.

I have often questioned whether or not I’m an artist, a writer. And whether or not I should be an artist. I think that I don’t take it seriously enough, because art doesn’t always come first for me; I do all sorts of things other than art. The most obvious is work: as a teacher, I put in fifty or so hours a week on my job, and since I’m an English teacher, a lot of that time is spent reading and writing and talking about reading and writing. I took the job because I thought it would be both fun and beneficial for me to be surrounded by language and literature,  and to some extent it has been both; but I don’t understand why I didn’t think about how much effort it would take to do the job well. I question all the time whether I should have stayed a janitor, some kind of nice, essentially mindless work that would allow me to go home at the end of the day and write, for hours on end. I ask myself: are you really an artist if you spend all of this time and energy on your job? Shouldn’t all of that effort go into writing? Shouldn’t you quit your job and find a mindless one? Or at the least do your job poorly, with the minimum expenditure of effort?

Maybe so.

I also took this job because of summers off, and the several week(s)-long vacations; I figured I could use that time to write more seriously. And I have; summer has always been my primary writing time, along with spring break and winter break, and fall break, now that I have that. But even in those times, I only spend a couple of hours a day, at most, on actual writing. I’ve read about authors who work for eight hours a day, or who lock themselves away for a month, two months, six months at a time, and do nothing but write, all day every day. And here I am with two or three months off, and I write for — an hour a day? Clearly I can’t be much of a writer if that’s all I can stand to do.

But that’s not fair. Because the truth is that writing is fucking hard. It takes an enormous effort to focus on every single word, every single punctuation mark, every sentence, every paragraph, and make exactly the right choices in exactly the right places; and to do that at the same time that I am trying to keep a larger story in mind? Especially when the story is a novel, and so I have both the complete scene I am writing and the overall story to keep in mind while I am selecting each and every word? Jesus Christ, it’s amazing I can do this at all, if you don’t mind my bragging a little. Of course I don’t make all of the right choices, I probably make wrong choices most of the time; but I’m good enough at this that even my wrong choices are generally not terrible, not unforgivable. And just as a doctor’s first rule is “Do no harm,” meaning make sure you don’t do the wrong thing even before you try to do the right thing, I think my first rule as a writer is, “Don’t write shit. Or at least if you write shit, don’t let anybody else see it.”

But even that is hard, because shit is enormously easy to write. Just ask James Patterson. BOOM! No, I’m kidding, he’s not a bad writer. He’s a whore who made a name for himself and then let his publisher pimp that name out in “collaborations” that Patterson likely has almost no hand in, but his name is prominent on the front cover in order to boost sales — but he’s not a bad writer. I don’t want to actually name any bad writers; I’m not going to throw any writers under the bus quite that hard, because all of us struggle with this. All of us have to put in this colossal effort, and then take this terrible soul-searing step of letting other people read what we write.

It’s brutal. It is laborious and effortful and wearing and taxing and just hard.

And I keep doing it. And I keep doing it well enough that I am pleased with what I produce. And I do it sincerely enough that I feel better emotionally after I’ve done it, after I’ve written honestly and as well as I can; even though I’m generally mentally exhausted after I do it. I will also say that I don’t write much more than an hour most days, but I can always put in that hour: these morning blogs have been quite good for that, it turns out; I’ve also worked on my book every day for the last few days, and I’ll do it today, too. I am also capable of some serious marathon sessions of writing: I wrote the final chapter of my most recent book over one weekend, two days of solid writing for more than eight hours each day; I produced something like fifty pages.

Huh. Maybe that’s why I haven’t written that much in the months since.

But even when I hit these dry patches, I still come back to it. Even though it’s hard — and it is hard, though I sometimes fool even myself into thinking that it’s easy because sometimes the words just come and are perfect; but that is the end result of a whoooooooooole lot of hours spent slogging, and writing and rewriting and discarding the whole thing and then starting over again. Still I put in the time. I put in the work. Because I love it, and I believe in it, and I like myself better when I do it than when I don’t.

I guess I am an artist, after all.