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A few years ago back in Vancouver I met a guy who, when he learned I’m a writer told me that he wished he could spend more time writing. Without thinking too much about it I gave him my oft-repeated sage advice, “just write.” Lots of people tell you they write, many of them do not. Not this guy. A few months later I ran into him again and he credited me for changing his life. How so, I asked? He told me he had written his first screen play. Now this guy might be a writer, but he also has a fairly demanding career that has nothing whatever to do with writing, unless you consider briefs and reports creative. He has since made the script into a film, written another one and has moved on to the ambition to write a book.

I have no doubt he’ll do it. And I think I could and should learn a thing or two from his fecundity, and determination!

I’m lucky enough to have a book agent interested in an idea of mine. The only thing is, I met with him just about 3 months ago and I still haven’t delivered the document he asked for. First I couldn’t get to it because I had a month to go on an energy draining day job (that was not an excuse but the unfortunate truth), then I needed a good stretch of down time from the job – realizing as I do, from experience, that there is a time to think and a time to write. Then I had a few days in a row, maybe weeks, of killer self-doubt. Then, when I was just starting to write the damn thing, a family emergency interrupted my flow.

Sounds like a likely story.

I started out the day today reading, or rather re-reading Doug Coupland’s Life After God. It's vintage Coupland, and I can’t tell whether he inspires me or stops me in my tracks. He’s so good at writing (a statement that doesn’t even cover the half of it), and I admire his creative brain. I read the book on my balcony (which I cleaned off and set up furniture on for the express purpose of starting my day out sipping coffee and reading inspirational things to spark my own creativity – though, I know it seems like more procrastination to spring clean when time is money in the freelance world).

Reading Coupland, and any great and imaginative writer for that matter, makes you worry that you’ll never be able to write that well. So, I started searching for my Writer’s Gym, a book about writing to which Coupland contributed. His advice was “write everyday.” Tall order, even when there’s nothing much else to do. Not sure why. When I’m working fulltime at some drudgery in that horrific, mind-numbing office setting rife with office politics and uneven work distribution based on favouritism and the like, I crave time to write. When I organize my life to make time to do nothing but writing, I spend my time reading other writers, and books about how to write and then pray to wake up with words.

It seems like a crazy way to live, but I can’t seem to go fully back to anything else now.

So, I think I’ll take my own damn brilliant advice and really try hard to just write, everyday. Even if it means these few paragraphs of anxiety are the only thing I produce today.