The Passion for the Job, Part 2

How do you keep going as a writer?

Part 1 of this post covered my first-order answer: you re-inspire yourself, day after day. You find the fire for the work that is totally divorced from the current age, the current literary or publishing landscape, the current zeitgeist. Then you sit down to the writing yet again.

From there, I promised more about the concrete craft advice in Alice McDermott’s What About the Baby?.

In the book, Alice tells us not to write with a point to be made, neither in our storytelling nor in our character conception. She tells us to concern ourselves with speaking in our sentences, not with dazzling. She tells us to embrace exposition. That a few lines of exposition create the drama that we use to enter the scene.

She says more than this, too. But the best of even the hard craft wisdom always boils down to that all-important question: what will re-inspire you to sit down again to the work? What sparks the sentence or the new idea that unlocks the next sentence or n…