I read two articles recently. One was about the love/hate relationship we writers have with our craft, and the other was about how creativity – or to say that writing is a creative process – is a lie. I’ve come to realize that the two things go hand in hand.

It’s something only a writer can understand, really. One moment you start writing and lose yourself in your work. Everything you write flows like a damned golden waterfall; immaculate. You look up and hours have passed, thousands of words now written. The next moment, it’s a chore just to keep yourself planted in the chair. Everything else – even things you’d normally put off – seems to be a better, less painful alternative. You’re not feeling it, and the words that do come out are certain crap.

But then in a month you go back and read what you wrote under both of those times and the Immaculate Prose now seems trite and cliched. And the absolute drivel you penned while in a comatose state? Well. You must have been having an out-of-body experience, because it’s damn good, and you sure as hell can’t remember writing it.

Everyone says that if you want to be a writer, you need to write and write daily. But as artists and the most caustic of critics, we condemn ourselves if we are not feeling ‘creative’, convinced we can write nothing under such duress. But we have to write. Even when we don’t want to do it, we have to. It’s the writer’s affliction, and it has absolutely nothing to do with creativity.

So the next morning you get up and drag yourself to the computer before anyone else is awake, remember this as you stare in agony at a blank screen: If you wait for ‘creativity’ to take hold, you may find yourself still staring at that screen a week, a month, or even a year later.