Writing is an industry like any other. We writers have products to sell, our labor, our life's blood and our souls. We spend time every day looking for places to put our labor where the yield of lucre will be high. And we work in isolation. Very few of us spend time in offices with other writers, our work for the day handed to us, and hours of work begun and ended at reasonable times.

We begin each day in anticipation of fulfilling the next assignment, and if the next assignment does not appear on the horizon soon enough to meet our needs, we spend hours, days, weeks, searching for the next client, for that is how we pay our rent and send our children to college.

As we wash the dishes and sweep the floors, we are considering how the character in that book we are writing will respond to the next plot twist. It is rather like playing God, as the object is to give that character as much grief he can withstand, until he does whatever it is, and reaches the climax of the story. When everything flows as it should, we can set the scene in motion, and simply sit back and watch as it pours through or fingers onto the page.

That is the easy part of writing. There is also the brutish part of it. Every day a certain number of words must be written, and every day two and three times as many words must be edited to send out for publication. It is never ending, and few of us can permit ourselves the luxury of what so many writers have called a dry well. Instead we sit at our desks and put one work after another onto the page. And then we go back to make sense of them and to fill in all the holes.

The process forces us to grow in discipline, insight and character, for we are constantly analyzing those elements in ourselves in order to infuse our fictional characters with the ability to perhaps understand themselves.

And, as writers, we are just this side of insane, for a day not spent writing feels like a day that has been lost.