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When new acquaintances hear that I write romances, a lot of them say the same thing.  “I want to write something...I’m just waiting for the right moment.  I need to finish X.” That X might include raising a two-month-old to college age, getting tenure at their job, getting a new job, getting a husband, getting a life...whatever.  They’re not going to write until that perfect moment comes along.  A fair share of these people go on to tell me that they’d love to write a romance and they really mean to...someday.

So yesterday I was at the university (my second job) and I went to a fascinating lecture about Sir Walter Scott.  He’s the guy who wrote Ivanhoe and whom I—before yesterday—basically knew as one of the people in the Author Card game, though it’s shameful to say so.  I once made a valiant attempt to read one of his novels and gave up.  At any rate, Scott was a huge success in his day.  He was the romance blockbuster of the age, writing adventuresome, romantic wild stories about heroines disguising themselves in breeches, disowned heros running off to Scotland and turning into millionaires, evil villains, beautiful maids and murderous mothers.  All the stuff that romance writers deal with these days—in fact the only reason why Scott isn’t ripping up the Bestseller Lists right now is the pesky fact that his language is a bit outdated, and his novels are absurdly long.

What really fascinated me in the lecture was the story of how Sir Walter Scott wrote one of his most famous novels, Rob Roy.  One day he was struck by an incredible pain in his abdomen.  It was a cramp so awful that he fell to the floor.  In the next few months, things got worse and worse, to the point where he couldn’t get out of bed for the pain, he couldn’t think due to the “jangling” of his thoughts, he couldn’t read because his vision blurred, and he couldn’t hear because of the buzzing in his ears.  The doctors couldn’t figure out what to do—so they gave him copious amounts of morphine, which may have helped with the pain, but didn’t exactly get him moving and back in the office.

But Walter had a book due:  Rob Roy, the dashing story of a bad boy hero who is exiled to Scotland and ends up taking over the family’s ancestral estate and making a ton of money.  Walter can’t walk, can’t read, can’t hear, and is in excruciating pain.  What does Walter do?

He writes the book.

Our lecturer pointed out that at several points there’s a kind of sourness in the story that she puts up to the author’s physical distress.  What I found more interesting was the fact that he kept going.  Being an author is the kind of job where no one is standing over you with a whip.  No one logs you into work (except maybe if you’re a Squawker, in which case you might get mean emails enquiring how much you’ve written that day).  But my point is that you’re on your own.

What drives you has to come from inside.  There has to be an inner voice saying:  it’s more important that I write this book than I take the next dose of morphine, than I spent the next five hours having quality time with my two-year-old, than I find a partner.

What about you?  Are you a writer—and do you keep the fire as fiercely as Sir Walter Scott?  If you’re not a writer, what do you feel that fiercely about?  What would you keep doing, no matter what stood in your way?  Another way to put it:  what were you born to do?
Eloisa