Entry # 200 – “A Well-Lived Life”

I was thinking about what is essential for a well-lived life and what do writers need in order to do their best work. After all, there are easier ways to live in the world than to be a writer. 

Not only do writers need a room of their own, that is, a special place where they can think and dream in solitude as they write, but they also need a social and emotional support system in order to produce their best work, because the writer’s life has a steady supply of rejections and failures that can chip away at the soul. Support systems include a chorus of friends and fellow writers who bring essential encouragement, and if we are lucky, a supportive partner who understands what it is we are trying to do.

We all deserve loving, supportive people in our lives. Having a supportive, loving relationship certainly has helped me grow as a writer and as a person.

Jeanne – May 2012

My partner understands my quirks and forgives when necessary.  We are both better people together than when we were alone. We keep each other sane and secure. And that security provides emotional freedom that deepens our capacity to give and receive in a balanced loving life. We don’t complete each other, rather our life together allows us to better experience and explore our own individual wholeness.

Part of being a writer involves coming to terms with the mismatch that often exists between the beauty of what we can almost imagine and what we find in stark reality on the page when we transmit images to words. 

I find comfort in this quote from Ann Patchett’s craft essays in The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing & Life. Patchett says that “Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of the imagination for the stark disappointment of words . . . on the flat surface of a page.”   

“And we need all the loving support we can find,” Jan says.