On the last day of the year 2021, I posted an article at SleuthSayers on a topic dear to me. It all started with a friend saying these words to me ages ages ago:

“I hate to break this to you, but someday you’re going to die. Life is short. If you want to write, you have to make time for it now.”

You can read the whole post—Writer, Feed Thyself—here.

One of the commenters said my article should be some kind of required reading for writers. That’s high praise, but I think you should probably read the essay I’m about to link to before mine.

In the early 1990s, when I was working in New York City, the same friend mailed me an essay he discovered in LA Weekly. These were the days before email was commonly available; humans routinely inserted something in an envelope when we wanted to share them with friends. This is called Mailing A Letter.

The piece is by the writer Michael Ventura, and it’s the best essay I’ve ever read about why writing is so tough to do, and why so many of us struggle with it.

Why are those things so hard? Why are writers—and possibly all creative people—so fucked up?

It has to do with the Talent of the Room, Ventura says.

What’s that?

“Writing is something you do alone in a room.”

Go over to Michael Ventura’s website to read the whole thing. You can even download the article as a PDF and read it.