Last weekend, when I was at my sister’s engagement party, my cousin’s husband asked me to tell him about writing. After bending his ear for about forty-five minutes, I slowed down long enough to ask him why he wanted to know about writing.

Turns out he was thinking about doing some writing himself. But he seemed a wee bit poleaxed after I had, well, unloaded. See, he had this idea about what writing was like that many people have: You write a book. You send it to an editor. Who buys it. The editor is really just a glorified proofreader whose job is to correct your typos. Then your book is published and you wait for the money to roll in.

I’m pretty sure I disabused him of this notion. Though, in all fairness, there are probably some people for whom that imagined experience may be true. It’s just not the case on a broad scale. And I cast no aspersions on him for not knowing what writing is like. Most people don’t.

Writing sounds like fun. It sounds like an easy way to make a living. After all, it’s creative and it’s not as if you’re digging ditches.

I was thinking about the whole writing thing because right now, I’m work-avoiding. For me, much of writing is work-avoidance. As well as strategies that look like work-avoidance, but actually aren’t. Like puttering.

I write in big chunks for the most part. I may sit (and sometimes putter) for three hours at a time, but the actual writing happens in about a half hour. I often start working, get to a spot where I’m stumped, and then I go putter around the house. I’ll load the dishwasher. I’ll make the bed. I’ll clean the cat boxes. Whatever. I’m not actually paying that much attention to those chores. What I’m doing is thinking about what happens next in the story. And often in the middle of such puttering, I’ll have that eureka-moment, and the chore I was doing ends up unfinished.

But then there are the days when nothing comes.

Or, as I like to think of them: Hell.

There are days when no amount of puttering, talking to myself, or staring at the screen will produce more than 100 words. And the really annoying thing is that when the piece is done, I can’t tell the difference between the days when words flowed from my fingers and the days when it was Hell.

The thing is, no two writers write alike. I’m not talking about prose here. I’m talking about the act of writing. I’ve read a few “How to Write” books, and for the most part, they’re not really helpful. I say this because the people who are writing these books are writing about how they write.

Rita Mae Brown wrote one of my favorite “How to Write” books called Starting From Scratch. She had a lot of great things to say about writing. Until she got to the part where she spent an entire chapter talking about how you really couldn’t be a great writer unless you speak Latin.

Then there’s one of the hoariest books on writing, published in 1934, Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. When I read this in college, I was convinced I would never be a writer because, according to Brande, unless I wrote every day, I wasn’t a writer. Years later, I discovered that plenty of writers don’t write every day. Including really good writers.

I do think there are things one should do as a writer. However, these involve craft rather than the habits of writing. I distrust books telling people how to write because the authors are always convinced that they know the manner in which everyone should write.

Writers are, as far as my experience goes, a bunch of insanely egotistic, neurotic, delightful, horrible, insecure, talented hacks who hate/love what they do, and who write about murder, love, society in crisis, vampires, robots, insanity, family, fairies, princesses, cowboys, rocket ships, and other stuff I’ve haven’t listed here. Oh, and ponies.

So, what about you?