Writing time

This is gorgeous. “The truth about writers” by J. Robert Lennon in the Los Angeles Times.

If you are a child, and your writer parent is scolding you for failing to do your homework, and then he or she suddenly stops, blinks twice, and tells you to go spend the rest of the afternoon playing video games and eating Pirate Booty, then he or she is actually working.

To allow our loved ones to know that we are working when we are supposed to be engaged in the responsibilities of ordinary life would mark us as the narcissists and social misfits we are. And so we have invented “writing time” as a normalizing concept, to shield ourselves from the critical scrutiny we deserve.