Writing Is Like Eating: The Hunger and the Work

You can’t always predict when hunger is going to rumble your insides. You can only hope you’ll have food available when it does, food that’s cooked and ready to eat—not ingredients in the fridge or the pantry. But so many times, that’s what happens: you’re hungry but now you’re facing thirty minutes or an hour of prepping, cooking, baking, etc., and all the while your stomach continues to grumble.

When an idea leaps into your brain or a thought pops up out of the fresh spring soil of your imagination, you hope you'll be ready for it. Will you have your computer, or notebook, or phone, or, at least, a napkin and a pen, handy and charged and updated or clean and full of ink or lead? Most importantly, you hope you'll have the time and energy at that moment to fire up the engines, to push your brain to 100% function and hold it there, in the red, for thirty minutes or an hour or more.

You’re eager to realize the idea, to fulfill its promise of greatness. But too often you spend that post-inception adrenaline prepping, writing, deleting and rewriting, struggling to do the work that will create in reality what you envisioned so elegantly in your mind. You’re hungry for the meal but all through the process of cooking it your stomach complains.

If you aren’t prepared, the idea becomes sadly relegated to a note that’s soon lost in the wilderness of digital clutter or left in a pocket and shredded in the laundry. The thrill of inception—the fuel of creation—is gone and, with it, the motivation to do the work.

Worse, if you’re unable to store the fleeting idea somewhere, anywhere, it evaporates, forgotten forever. Only the taste of possibility lingers in your mouth. You know it was there, once, new and exciting, but its content and context are gone. You salivate, wishing for the food you desire, hot and fresh, but missing the key ingredients.

Writing is like eating. Ideas are like hunger. They spark energy, they inspire action, they demand work but they are all too often met with unpreparedness and, much later, with a dull blade, a cool stove, a missing ingredient.

Having Written

There's a saying I've seen attributed to Dorothy Parker:

I hate writing. I love having written.

I love writing when I'm ready for the idea. When I'm not, I empathize with this feeling. I'd much rather have written the thing than stare unmotivated and miserable into the work ahead.

In the same way, I think, the hungry cook doesn't look forward to cooking. She looks forward to having cooked and, thus, eating.

But one must eat to survive. Ready or not, you, writer, must write.