I need - and occasionally love - to write for the same reasons I always did: hard as writing is, it's generally easier than life.
I don't really know how to do much else besides write.
This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.
The art and act of writing - speaking just for myself - involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair.
How do you write when you're not miserable? The solution, of course, is to make yourself miserable about not writing.
I think it's just too kinda juicy and compelling to imagine people in their private lives, but then half the time people's private lives are just so much more bizarre and Ted Haggard-like than you could ever imagine. It's almost hard to write fiction anymore.
I used to say, for me, writing was like walking a high wire, and heroin made me forget there was no net. Which is a fancy way of saying dope made me forget how shitty I felt for being on dope.
