A writer loves to have written.

I’m three song ideas in tonight and I still can’t come up with anything I want to keep. Songwriting, while it remains the thing I think about most during the day, is not actually something that I consider a true joy. For those of you who write songs and it’s the greatest joy and you feel alive and rainbows and kittens abound during your songwriting process: ugh.

I have been incredibly encouraged by people like Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Gilbert–two writers who have compared themselves to work mules when it comes to actually writing anything.

My question to fellow writers: do you actually enjoy the process, or is it really more like that backward warped enjoyment thing that mothers claim to have when they say you forget about how horrifyingly nightmarish the birthing process was once they see their child?

I’m also encouraged by Brian Eno’s wisdom. He says:

What would be really interesting for people to see is how beautiful things grow out of shit, because no one ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head, that they somehow appeared there, formed in his head, and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is that things come from nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people that are so gifted; they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that, then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, “Well, I know that things come from nothing and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.”

Back to the drawing board.