The desire to write

 The writer Hugh Prather left this aphorism to torment people like me: 

If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire is not to write.

 

The implication is that the desire is for something else.

The Old Editor used to make a similar point. He said that he knew a lot of people who wanted to be famous and to spend their days talking to interesting people in cafes in Paris. He mentioned a fellow we knew who wanted to be a writer but did not want to write. The Old Editor counseled him to buy a beret.

I get the point. But not writing is not always a case of misplaced desire.

A construction project began at our house this week. I can assure Prather and the Old Editor that you can have a desire to write while you are unloading a half ton of floor tile off a truck and moving everything that was in the kitchen elsewhere, which means that you are not actually writing.

I searched my soul for any hint of desire that I’d rather be doing backbreaking labor.

I claim to be innocent.

• Source: Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person; New York: Bantam, 1983.