It's not just that no one can read my stuff if I haven’t written it, or that I can’t get paid if I haven’t written it, or that no one will be helped and guided by my stories if I haven’t written them – it’s that I have forgotten and disregarded the actual, moment-to-moment experience of writing.

Every writer has experienced that scene that “wrote itself,” the character that talked her way into your story against your will, or the perfect ending that seemed to be waiting for you while you struggled through the beginning and middle. In my experience, the more you write, the more you experience these “miracles.” Though you might not admit it to anyone but another writer, you have probably come to depend on them.

The words we choose are an expression of a point of view on the story we’re telling and on life itself. Every single word is a choice, after all. Another person simply cannot make choices for me because they have not lived what I’ve lived and seen what I’ve seen and loved who I’ve loved.

I had no idea what anyone else liked. I never have. I know what I like; I know what excites me and what holds my attention. Everyone else’s desires and curiosities, my friends and family included, remain necessarily mysterious to me. What other people like, ultimately, is none of my business.

I often feel a twinge of victim-hood whenever I’m misunderstood. “I’m innocent!” I think. “You and your muddled thinking are guilty.” But in all my years of writing and talking, I’ve never once figured out how to make anyone understand me. All I can do is try to be clearer and more honest.

This is what desperation does to me. In its throes I am stricken with a hallucinatory blindness so that all I can see is what I don’t want. I don’t know how to not create what I don’t want. And so I don’t know what to do, and so I think, “I can’t do this,” and so it doesn’t happen.

The longer I have lived as an artist, the more I have come to believe that my sustained happiness and success depends not on what I make or share but on what I believe about myself when I am not making or sharing anything.

This problem of the truth feeling like a lie followed me often, particularly with my writing career. It too felt like a kind of lie sometimes, a mirage of an idea that existed only in my mind.

I may crave the moment I can close the door to my workroom and sit quietly at my desk and once again enter the dream of the story I have been telling, but I must never mistake this experience for loneliness. Storytellers are never alone, although we are by ourselves.

I wouldn’t let myself write about these things I didn’t understand but wanted to understand. I suppose I was afraid I would write about them and that other people would either not get what I meant or not care, and then there I’d be, stranded forever on an island of inscrutable thought.

If you don’t actually want to play the game, you will not get any better at it, and you will not care about focus or grace or technique. You will look at the game and think, “This is all made up. The points aren’t real, nothing real is won or lost, and the rules can be changed as quickly as we change our minds. It’s all pretend.”

Like bad book reviews, the past and all its suffering isn’t going anywhere. It will always be. So right now, in this moment, I have to decide what I actually believe about myself and all the other people in the world – every single living and dead one of us.