Writing about being tired, writing

Some days, you just don’t want to get out of bed. Your tiredness is larger than your willpower. I do have the luxury of sleeping in if I want to, but I know I can’t. There’s a lot of writing to be done, stories to be finished, articles to be sent off, maybe even a touch of blogging.

I’ve been nibbling on various books on writing, and here’s a very relevant (to my writing) excerpt I picked up from the Tao of Writing:

Years ago I was talking to a woman I knew who ran each day with remarkable regularity. Being relatively unathletic myself, I asked her if she ran in the rain, feeling an involuntary chill as I imagine cold sheets of water drenching my neck and shoulders, and squishing in my gym shoes.

“Do you think we like to run in the rain?” she asked me. “We run because we need to run, and it happens to be raining, so we run anyway.”

A few years later, I heard essentially the same thing from another runner. I had gone away for the weekend with a group of friends. We were staying in a cabin in beautiful Big Sur, California. One of the women had got up and had run six miles before the rest of our group was even fully awake. I asked her how she could just get up and run like that.

“I don’t know, she said, “I just don’t feel good unless I run.”

Later in the day, overlooking the ocean at Nepenthe, a restaurant famous for its breathtaking ocean view, I said to her, “Hold on, I have to go the car and get my journal. I feel a poem coming on.”

“How can you just write like that?” she asked.

“I don’t know” I said. “I just don’t feel good unless I write.”