Weekend Edition – Stillness, Solitude, and the Practice of Writing

Writing is a solitary act, but being a writer is not.  We live in the Real World with everyone else, and our lives are just as full and noisy and chaotic as the next person’s. We have friends and family to care for and enjoy. We have day jobs (with meetings and emails and conference calls) and households to manage (via negotiation and sometimes bribery). We are subjected to the same onslaught of news, social media, and sundry other local and global communications as every other non-luddite member of this hyper-connected human race.

What makes writers different is that our lives include another layer that exists, sometimes above and sometimes below, everything else: the world of our writing. And, unlike the activity-powered Real World, this other world of stories and ideas and dreams is brought to life by stillness and solitude.

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When I was a kid, I spent a…