date created: 2024-09-17 11:16
date modified: 2024-12-09 19:16

Rush, K.K. (2019) Writing with Chronic Illness

The cleaning aisle is filled with chemicals; the all-natural perfume shops are not. — location: 54

Everything is chemicals, Kris

Email isn’t writing. Research isn’t writing. Rewriting isn’t writing. Only new words is writing. — location: 666

So many writing gurus advise that you set an hour count (work five to eight hours per day) or a word count. Which is well and good for the healthy folk, but for someone with a chronic illness, a daily quota is as impossible as a day job. — location: 759

Victories are important. Because in a world where everyone else seems to have more energy and an ability to get more than one task done per day, it’s so easy for a chronically ill person to see life as a series of failures. — location: 798

What’s the point? I can’t tell you how many times writers ask me that question. What’s the point of all the struggle? Why am I even trying? Who cares that I write? No one buys my books anyway. (Note that writers of all levels say that last sentence, because they compare. No one buys the book might mean it sells no copies at all or it might mean that “only” 100 people bought copies or that the book isn’t selling millions of copies. Again, the evils of comparison.) — location: 1193

So…what is the point? Aside from doing something you love, which shouldn’t be an aside at all? The point is your perspective. You are a unique individual with a unique point of view. No one else views the world the way that you do. No one else could. Sure, there are seven plots and Shakespeare wrote them all better, as one of my creative writing instructors once said. So what? Shakespeare is dead, and you’re not. The only way that some of us will experience your perspective is if you write it down. If you write one of those seven plots from your point of view, rather than some old dead playwright’s. You might never know that the person who loves your work so much they reread it dozens of times. But that person is out there. You just have to write and put the work out there—whatever that means for you.