Guest post by Kim Golden 

Picture this: a scruffy sports bar in Richmond, Virginia in the early 1990s. A group of young writers talking shop over pitchers of Sam Adams and bowls of greasy fries. We are all drunk on youth, on beer, on the freedom to write when and where we want. The warm summer night air is heavy with promise—of words written and words to write, of sex, of stories longing to be told. And yet…we didn’t care. Or perhaps we did, and just didn’t understand the gift we’d been given. 

Back then, we could spend all day, all night, writing and talking about writing. As students in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, we spent our mornings teaching or working in the Writing Center, our afternoons in cafés or in seminars, our evenings in creative writing workshops, and our nights in various bars imitating the writers we admired, writing drunk, editing sober. We took for granted that our lives would always be like this. I think we all imagined we’d continue our careers in the academia, teaching classes, hopefully on tenure track at some point, with our summers always free for road trips or writing in parks. The idea of having to balance our lives—of actually needing to carve out time for writing—never occurred to us. And most of the time, we wasted all of those precious hours when we could have been writing—we were too busy with our social lives or talking about writing instead of simply writing. 

Now fast forward fifteen-odd years. And picture this: an open-plan office in Stockholm on a gray winter day. I’m sitting in front of my computer screen writing product copy for a mascara. Apparently this one is different from the other mascaras I’ve written about. This one volumes and lengthens…though the others do that too. My To Do List still has way too many items on it, but I’m not making any progress. There are too many meetings, too many deadlines, too many people interrupting, just when I’m about to think of a new way to describe lashes. I tell myself I’ll write during my lunch break, but then someone schedules another meeting, so my planned hour of writing while having a sandwich and a latte dwindles to a quickie 20-minute lunch, no notebook in sight?

I’ll write at home…

But at home, a stack of laundry awaits, and the projects I didn’t finish at the office have to be worked on while I also try to make dinner.  

In an hour I’ll write…

I’ve updated the copy for work, mailed it to the brand managers who need to approve it. I’ve made dinner, washed a load of laundry. I settle on the sofa and open Scrivener and then the words…don’t come. I open my inspiration boards on Pinterest and tell myself they’ll help me manage at least 500 words today. For a while, nothing happens…other than the usual drooling over Nikolaj Coster-Waldau or Chiwetel Ejiofor or Jared Leto. Little snippets of scenes spark to life, slowly, slowly. And then I begin planning a scene in my head, without actually writing a word. 

Another hour passes, more scene ideas leave the corners and edge closer. My fingers finally dance along the keyboard and the word count flourishes, blossoming into a number far higher than what I’d expected. That old familiar feeling—one I remember from my Richmond days—sparkles inside me. That feeling of being drunk with words, with stories…it’s back, it just plays hard to get from time to time. And though I don’t always relish my 9-to-5 job, it gives me the financial freedom to go to writers’ conferences, indulge in writer’s retreats. I carve out my writing time from the chaos. Without it the grind of life feels pointless. I must tell stories. I must work until my writing can pay for itself. I write all day at the weekend, I write as long as I can when I come home from work. 

I write…and that’s all that matters.