Somewhere on the Internet, I found the “6 Misconceptions About Writing” by Rebecca McClanahan, which is excerpted from Write Your Heart Out, which was published in 2001. Ms McClanahan is the author of ten books and is also an educator, and public speaker. She specializes in essays and memoir, the craft of writing, and the creative process.

I quote from her document below.

“Misconception #2: Writers have time to write.
For many people on this planet, writing is not an option. Those who are locked in the jaws of war, illness, poverty, violence, illiteracy, starvation, natural or unnatural disasters don’t have the luxury of writing. Getting from one day to the next is all they can manage.
On the other end of the scale are those for whom life affords every luxury.
Blessed with health, talent, opportunities and material resources, their only
responsibility is to the blank page or canvas. Some are born into wealth and
privilege; their days are and will always be truly theirs, to use as they will.
Others, through cosmic collisions of luck and fate, are granted uninterrupted time and space in which to work. If they chose to write their hearts out, nothing can stop them—or so it appears. (We’ll talk more about this assumption later.)
The rest of us fall somewhere between these extremes. And though we cite
plenty of reasons for not writing, lack of time seems to be the biggest factor.
Listen in on any group of writers long enough, and chances are the subject of time will come up. “If I just had more time,” someone sighs aloud, and everyone around the table nods agreement: the poet/single mother of three, the essayist/ computer programmer, the novelist/college student, the mystery writer/nurse, the memoirist/carpenter.
The challenge of making time to write is not new nor is it trivial. For centuries, writers have felt time’s weight pressing down upon them, and many have collapsed beneath it. Books, journals, diaries and interviews are filled with their struggles. In Tillie Olsen’s meticulously detailed Silences, which ironically marked the end of Olsen’s own twenty-year literary silence, she tells of famous and unknown writers alike whose work was interrupted, postponed, abandoned, or, in some cases, barely begun. As Olsen explains, time wasn’t the only pressure bearing down on these writers, but it was one of the heaviest. Heavy enough to silence Melville’s prose for thirty years while he wore himself out at the customs dock trying to make ends meet. Heavy enough to force Katherine Anne Porter to spend twenty constantly-interrupted years writing Ship of Fools rather than the two years she estimated it would have taken had she been able
to write full time.
Any piece of writing requires time, and a sustained, artistic, well-crafted creation requires not only actual writing time but time for imagining, thinking, feeling, dreaming, revising, reconsidering, and beginning again. The circumstances of our lives eat up that time; that’s why we call them “time-consuming.” Some time consuming circumstances are welcome: playing with our children, making dinner for friends, planting a flower garden, taking a trip to the mountains. Other circumstances, if not always welcome, are nevertheless necessary: going to work, filling out tax forms, changing the oil filter, making out the grocery list. But whether welcome or unwelcome, pleasant or unpleasant, necessary to our physical survival or to our emotional well-being, these circumstances use up time, time that is not being used for writing.
When day-to-day circumstances absorb the time that could/should/might be
used for writing, you may get a little edgy. You might even get angry or envious, imagining living the life of a Real Writer, someone who doesn’t have to work at another job, or two or three, to make ends meet, who doesn’t have to mow the lawn, call the plumber, take out the garbage, clean the chimney, make breakfast, grade papers, feed the kids and the cat. I’ve wasted whole afternoons doing that old two-step, The Sulk & Carry. (The steps are simple: You just sulk awhile, then carry it with you all day.) It’s just not fair, I tell myself. In addition to everything else they have, Real Writers have time to write.
Or so it appears on the surface. In actuality, no person, however rich or free of outside constraints, has time to write. True, some people have more money, energy, opportunity, or freedom from day-to-day duties than the rest of us. But nature abhors a vacuum, and each life, however privileged, must fill with something. And fill it does. All the time in the world, by itself, will not make writing happen. Or, as we’ve said before, writing only happens by writing, and only the person who writes the book can write the book.
Okay, so maybe it won’t be a whole book. Not this year, anyway. Maybe what you’ll manage is a poem a year, one long letter on each grandchild’s birthday, a handful of travel essays or short stories, a stack of editorials written to your local newspaper, song lyrics for your daughter’s wedding, one wild and crazy screenplay, or a locked diary filled with your secret fears and wishes. Whether you end up publishing a body of work that makes Joyce Carol Oates’ output look paltry, or whether you write one story that no one but yourself ever sees, is beside the point. The point is, you’re writing.
As the Rolling Stones song says, “You can’t always get what you want…but if
you try sometime, you just might find you’ll get what you need.” If you can make time to read this book, you can make time to write. If you can make time to watch the evening news or your favorite sit-com, you can make time to write.
True, you may not be able to make the time you want, but you can make the
time you need. You may even find that time limits actually feed the writing
process. (We’ll discuss this in the next chapter.)
Most of us already have everything we need to do the kind of writing we need to do. And if we don’t yet have what we need, there are ways to go about getting it. We can change the external circumstances of our life to allow more time for writing, we can wait for our circumstances to change, or we can learn to work within the restraints imposed upon us. But one thing is certain: If we spend time complaining that we have no time, we’ll have even less time to write.

I was somewhat startled to find this book in the English language section of the bookstore in Capo D’Orlando, Sicily. But maybe the owner had read it and thought it might find a buyer among the half-dozen English speaking tourists here who were born before the publication date (1957), and felt guilty about never having read this American classic. If so, he was right. I was at university at the time, had plenty to read and thought that this book was too hip for me. I confess that while I enjoyed reading it, it’s still too hip for me – or I’m too square.

The fly leaf inside the cover says that the author, Jack Kerouac, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. “In 1947, enthused by bebop (music), the rebel attitude of his friend, Neal Cassady, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he found in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as ‘spontaneous prose’, which he used to record the experiences of the beat generation. Kerouac wrote a number of hugely influential and popular novels – most famously the international bestseller On the Road. As much as anything, he came to represent a philosophy, a way of life.”

On the face of it this is a semi-autobiographical novel about an educated writer’s travels across the USA and Mexico with one particular male friend whom he admired, and in the company of other friends who drop in and out searching for kicks: alcohol, drugs, music and sex. Almost always destitute, they party all night and sleep during the day, moving from place to place mostly as hitchhikers, as jalopy drivers, and occasionally on buses. The original version of On the Road was typed by Kerouac on a scroll 37 meters long (to save time in changing sheets in the typewriter). It included explicit sex and the real names of some of the author’s friends; these were removed or changed at the insistence of the publisher, Viking. I notice that the original version has been published in 2008.

As for the ‘spontaneous prose’ used by Kerouac, it does make the novel marginally more difficult to read, but it also makes the emotions, the thoughts and the settings – bizarre as they sometimes are – more real. If I had known about the scroll version, I would have bought it instead, as being more authentic. Sex was a primary objective on the road, and the edited version mentions it only in passing.

As I reflect on the novel and its author, it seems that the novel created a sensation at the time it was published. I think that most readers today would wonder what the point of it all was. Was it really just irresponsible kicks and living life at maximum velocity and intensity. Kerouac’s biographer, Douglas Brinkley, says that the author was a committed Catholic. But there is none of this in the novel (except for doodles in the original margin). Kerouac also suffered from mental illness. Politically, he was conservative. But I don’t get a sense of the author’s values. If I were able to, that might answer the major question I have after reading this novel: Why?

Somewhere on the Internet, I found the “6 Misconceptions About Writing” by Rebecca McClanahan, which is excerpted from Write Your Heart Out, which was published in 2001. Ms McClanahan is the author of ten books and is also an educator, and public speaker. She specializes in essays and memoir, the craft of writing, and the creative process.

I quote from her document below.

“Misconception #1. Writing gets done without writing.

I usually don’t answer the phone during my writing hours, but when I do, it’s often a friend or family member calling, and the conversation goes something like this.
“Hi. What are you doing?”
“Writing,” I answer.
“Really?” she says, as if this were news, as if it weren’t the same answer I’ve
been giving for years now. We talk a while, she tells me about her day, I
complain about the essay that’s tying me in knots or I exalt in the final revision of a poem that’s been eluding me all summer. We say goodbye and hang up.
A week or two later she calls again.
“Hi. What are you doing?”
“Writing.”
Again she seems surprised. We talk a while, say goodbye, and after a few
minutes of sharpening pencils (I don’t even use pencils) or fantasizing about a six-figure advance on some book I’ll never begin, or staring out the window where people with real jobs and leather briefcases are hurrying to meetings, I get back to work. Later in the week while I’m getting a haircut, my stylist asks if I’m still writing, as if it were a bad habit, like smoking, that I surely must have kicked by now. It occurs to me to ask him if he’s still cutting hair, but I decide it would be mean-spirited. Besides, it takes energy to talk, and I need all my energy for the chapter revision that’s backing up in my head. So I just look in the mirror and nod politely.
Occasionally even writer friends seem surprised to find me writing, just as I’m sometimes amazed to catch them in the act. I realize this makes no sense. How else do I suppose their poems, stories, essays, songs, lectures and journal entries get written? Yet the fantasy that writing gets done without writing is so appealing, it’s a hard one to release—like the notion of babies being delivered pain free, via stork or cabbage leaf. Watching the freshly polished baby asleep in a blanket beside his exhausted mother, it’s easy to forget that just hours ago he was a squirming sack of blood and skin and primal scream. And reading someone else’s published novel—or a finished poem, short story or essay—it’s hard to imagine the often tedious, painful, messy, sometimes joyous, always life-changing process by which it was delivered, kicking and screaming, into the light.
Like sex or childbirth, writing is almost always a private act. Others don’t see us doing it, and the popular media do little to dispel the notion that writing gets done without writing. In movies about writers, the writers do everything but write.
They sit in dark cafes, dance on tables, smoke one thin black cigarette after
another, slap their lovers, drive too fast or drink too much. In the few scenes where they’re actually writing, the camera doesn’t linger. Who would pay seven dollars to watch someone sit at a desk and write? So the camera seeks out something more interesting—the bottle of Scotch, the unmade bed, the cocktail dress dropped on the floor—and moves on. One quick shot of the writer’s hand on the keyboard (typing, what else, “The End”) and he’s heading for the door, grabbing the finished manuscript and cigarettes on his way out.
No wonder we imagine writing gets done without writing. And no wonder we believe anyone can write a book. The truth is, anyone can’t write a book. Only the person who writes the book can write the book.”