Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

These are the words that mock me as another sun slips away outside my window. I meant to go out and do something today. I really did. I might have gone for a drive in the country, or a walk along the waterfront. I might have visited a museum, an aquarium, or an art gallery. I might have gone into town, found the quirkiest little store there, and bought myself something delightfully useless. If nothing else, I might have gone to a coffee shop, stood in line, and started up a conversation with another human being. One of flesh and bone, not paper and ink.

Instead, I wrote. That’s what writers do, isn’t it? They commit themselves to their craft, reading and researching and plotting and planning and type, type, typing away until they hit their daily word goal. 1500 today, 2000 tomorrow… If I really knuckle down, I can have the sequel out by Christmas!

It’s addictive, the daily grind. It reminds me of the MMOs I used to play as a child, every day, as soon as I got home from school. Games like RuneScape or DragonFable, where personal growth was as simple as clicking on things and waiting for an EXP bar to fill up. Words are my EXP now, chapters my level-ups. Each completed draft is a shiny new item in my inventory, celebrating how far I have come and how many hours I exhausted to get there. There is an undeniable appeal to that simplicity of purpose. It is nice to wake up in the morning and know exactly what you are going to do with the day.

Over time, however, the process starts to take on an uncanny, mechanical feel. The longer I spend in the world of words, the harder it becomes to remember the world of real things whirring on around me. Like a dopamine-addled child staring at a video game, I start to forget the world beyond my window. I forget that digital gold is worthless, no matter how high you pile it. I forget that words are supposed to refer back to real things, experiences, and feelings, not just more words.

And then the insecurities come knocking. My writing starts to feel hollow, repetitive, and trite, a series of linguistic tricks that become less impressive each time I trot them out. When the voices become too loud to ignore, I seek to plug my ears with still more words. I read old books and old newspapers, travel diaries and Wikipedia pages, fairytales and Reddit threads. I read, and I keep on reading, looking for the secret sauce that will give life to limp characters and import a little reality back into my imaginary world. Meanwhile, reality itself recedes to a high-pitched hum, perceptible only for the unplaceable disquiet its presence induces in me.

All I wanted was to become a better writer. Yet on days like today, it feels as though that very determination is holding me back from becoming a writer worth reading.

Sometimes, I return to the biographies of great writers past to console myself about the sad state of my own. Emily Dickinson was a shut-in, after all, and few would dare question the richness of her inner world. William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in his breaks between shoveling coal – hardly the most stimulating exercise in the world. Inspiration comes from a million different places, and firsthand experience is only one tool for a writer to rely on. You don’t have to be Ernest Hemingway, or Henry David Thoreau, or Hunter S. Thompson to have a story to tell. You can just be yourself. You can just write.

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Workaholism might be a personal vice, but it is also a collective symptom. Capitalism breeds it, necessitates it, and ultimately relies upon it. Even if I wanted to invest everything in a single “authentic” piece, and wait years for it to come to me, I do not have that option. “Writer” might be my hobby, my calling, even my identity, but it cannot be those things alone. It needs to be my profession. And professionals do not take days off to go wandering in the woods. Professionals go to work.

One’s bank balance is a kind of EXP bar, too. And when you get right down to it, fancy clothes and cars are not so different from suits of pixel armor on a screen. Maybe I err in attributing all of my angst to the occupational pitfalls of writing. Maybe I would feel just as disillusioned and restless working in engineering, or medicine, or finance. Maybe. Probably, even. But that doesn’t make me feel better. Writing was supposed to be my ticket out of the soul-destroying rat race, not an on-ramp to another, slower, sadder lane.

A different, darker kind of consolation lies in the anti-Dickinsons of the world. In those glitzy travel bloggers and influencers who travel the world, living out dream holiday after dream holiday with no higher purpose than the production of profitable “content.” Is a spectacular life lived in service of spectacle any more meaningful than a life spent squirreled away in books? Is a sponsored blog post about a tropical resort any more grounded than a fantasy story of a fairytale kingdom?

Maybe I should content myself with the written world, and the myriad modes of expression contained therein. After all, there’s still so much I haven’t read. If I accrue a little more knowledge, memorize a few more words, consume a few more classics, I might just find what I’ve been looking for. I might just cough up something worthwhile.

Yet still I have my doubts. Sometimes, I fear that we’re all just kidding ourselves. The adventurers, and the investigators, and the pots-and-pans researchers. We’re all fumbling around for that secret sauce that turns text into truth. But in the end, there is no secret sauce. There are only words, constituted and reconstituted in a billion different ways, forming and reforming ever more elaborate facades of originality and authenticity. Castles of sand, imitating castles of stone.

Time for bed now, I think. I’ll feel better in the morning.