Once upon a time, in the fabled woods of the writing life, a quaint cottage nestled in the trunk of a giant redwood. A magic garden provided food for its inhabitant(s) with just the tiniest bit of foraging; a fresh stream ran through the kitchen. Inside the cottage stood a desk and many shelves of books, lovely novels that teased the imagination into ever-expanding realms. Endless stacks of paper remained perfectly aligned there by an array of fountain pens with all possible colors of ink and the smoothest tips. Only the music of birds disturbed the air in that writer’s paradise, and the bold weaver of worlds woke up well-rested each morning, wrote several thousand words of brilliance before noon, and polished the previous day’s already-sparkling prose to greater clarity, humor, and communicative power in the afternoon.
Ah, to live there. Ah, to have no obstacles to writing–no time management problems, no distractions, no depression or cynicism, no other job, no basic human urges to satisfy, no human relationships tempting us away from the paper and pencil, no headache-inducing stress that makes you watch television mindlessly for hours rather than writing.