A writer, like it or not

I have always had the urge to write.  When I was a child, I wrote with such freedom and glee: poems, short stories, short books, even a novel, my poodle's autobiography.  In grade school, one of my poems was disqualified from a district competition because the judges believed someone my age could not have written it.  I was inordinately proud of that rejection.  In fact, I guess I still am because I'm still talking about it.  Even into early adulthood, I would often stay up until early morning with my Dr. Seuss book Scrambled Eggs Super in my lap (that was my laptop), while a screenplay or story flowed out of me. 

Still, even with all that, I didn't want to be a writer.  I wanted to be an actress, fervently, desperately, achingly, fiercely.  Writing was just something I did.  Acting was something I longed for and chased.  I dropped out of college after two years in order to move to Hollywood and carve out my career.  I didn't want to study theater, I wanted to be part of it, and film, commercials, TV.  During my years in Hollywood, I always had just enough success to feel hopeful, but never enough to actually thrive.

In my earlier years, when my life was simpler, when less was asked of me, when I'd spread myself less thin, I had the luxury of writing whenever I felt like it.  I wrote purely for the joy of it.  So I never created a practice, a routine, a habit of writing.  As I became more immersed in pursuing my acting career, writing moved more into the background, and for a long time I didn't write at all.

At some point, I started writing monologues for myself for acting classes and very quickly discovered that I'm not really a writer at all; I'm exclusively a playwright.  It's the only form in which I am truly comfortable and masterful.  Eventually I began to take myself seriously as a playwright and to devote myself to it.  One of the best aspects of writing is that I don't have to wait for someone to give me a job, as an actress does.  I can write anywhere any time.  All I need is a pencil and paper.  (Since I started writing pre-computer, I still write in longhand.)

However, since I never did cultivate any particular discipline in my writing habits, I have continued to write when I feel like it, and that feeling is inconsistent.  In fact, sometimes I avoid writing for days at a time, when I'm working on a play that is giving me trouble, I don't know what to do with it, I know it's broken but don't know how to fix it.  I'm quite sure this is why I have enjoyed a fair amount of success but am not and may never be a member of the pantheon of  Writers Whose Names People Know.

All of that is background for today's Something New.  Today, I did what I have never done before.  I had a writing session first thing in the day.  Okay, full disclosure, I fixed and ate breakfast first.  But then I got to work on my current project.  I didn't put it off until after everything else on my To Do list was done, which is what I usually do, which often means I don't get to the writing at all, or have to squeeze it into a short box of time.  I put writing first.  If I keep doing that, maybe this play will take me months rather than years to finish.  Maybe.  But I make no promises.