A writer's life for me

I’m doing a PhD. It still feels weird to say that when people ask what I’m doing with myself these days. Although, the alternative answer of ‘I spend my days reading about murder’ would probably impress people a whole lot less than dropping the PhD-bomb seems to. That is, until I tell them that my PhD is in Creative Writing, then a whole other can of worms gets opened about why I’m doing a PhD course in such a widely put-down subject. But it’s probably best that I don’t get on my soap box about that just yet… I thought the idea of a PhD was that you went in with an outstandingly specific idea and carved a place for yourself in your industry, based around this innovative idea of yours. So when it came to writing my proposal, that’s what I tried to do. In isolating a specific area of both history and modern literature that I thought was under-explored, I gained my place on the course. I had very strict ideas about how I would research and develop my novel - because that’s what m...

The unthinkable has happened. A writer friend, who I feel particularly close to, has told me that he doesn’t think he wants to write any more. It opened up a whole can of conflict in me when he told me, the first reason being - is that a choice that you can make? I was under the impression that writing was a calling or a vocation, or something else that sounds like a massive cliché, rather than something that you can stop and start at will. My second issue arose when he explained why… I’m paraphrasing, but he said something along the lines of: I’m tired of only writing when I feel shit about something. Writing used to be something that I really enjoyed but it seems to have turned into something that I do when I feel like a complete mess and I need an outlet. That’s the only stuff I ever write down these days and I don’t know that that’s a good approach to have, so I feel like I should get out of it. It brought up a lot of further questions, with the old favourite ‘why do you writ...