Right now, at this moment, countless writers are drowning under the great tedious chore of writing, the sitting down and staying there, the synapse firing and fingertip-biting craft while holding the fear and the knowledge that they are both failing miserably and succeeding triumphantly. And yet they'd do nothing else all day long until the world comes at them with her business (a word-grab from Mary Oliver) and asks them to make the bed, answer the door, pick up the kids, and wear deodorant - the executing of life.

What’s more, we need these writers to do what they are doing, to do it repeatedly. We also need them to wear deodorant. That is a lot to ask.

Create or execute? Create AND execute.

As much as we would like to distinguish ontological modes of being - a creative and executive type - they are intertwined; one exists for the other. I could not write without hours of scheduling, copy-editing, note-taking, photo tagging, decision-making and sizing, bill paying, and chucking all this mental chaos into a contained number of digestible words. The executive side of the personality - the one our culture promotes and at which it nods approval - must exist.

The writing desk of Virginia Woolf originator of one of the most enduring spaces/freedom metaphors. From the Duke University Library Collection.

Where does that leave the budding creative? Knocked about and tossed around by a tyrant? Working towards their annihilation?

Francis Bacon moved from one side of the flat to the next when he worked. The living side was tidy, clean, and minimal. And then there was the creating side:

Francis Bacon in his studio, 7 Reece Mews, London, in 1974. Photo Michael Holtz.

Such physical separation is extreme (nay impossible); Zadie Smith, a writer who has danced on this subject, once wrote of reading books while getting a massage, unable to do so, and stopped getting the massage.

Why does the more creative side suffer? Is it more meek, more eager to defer? Hardly, although my creative side could be more executive. Even the word "executive" was chosen by my executive side.

Thankfully, along comes Joan Frank, a writer and essayist who dances the concentric circles of self like a woman on the wire:

In reading or writing, we imagine with free-ranging motion, escaping present-time constructs-a process that nourishes and restores us in ways we don't yet fully understand, much like sleep. If someone or something repeatedly stops that wide-ranging movement midway (or even earlier), the "muscles" for this function learn to anticipate the siege-to expect the steep wall they're about to slam into. They adapt (as I see it) by tensing: vital for the brief allotted portion of their potential span but halting in Pavlovian reflex at precisely the position of customary stopped news, of expected interference. What happens then to our ability to think deeper, larger, and more audaciously? What do you call a state of mind which anticipates its own recurring annihilation?

Joan Frank. Courtesy of JoanFrank.org

In Because You Have To: A Writing Life, Frank dusts off the nonsense that coats creative professions:

Americans tend to feel uneasy when confronted with someone professing to practice art-or, for that matter, anything sounding high-minded. We distrust and fear what we haven't directly experienced because we don't want our ignorance exposed. An editor I once knew in a software publishing firm, a shy, unpresuming young woman, introduced her young husband at a company holiday dinner as an astrophysicist. All giddy cocktail-chitter was struck mute. People stared at each other. How to respond? More complicated reasons may lead to some bafflingly hostile reactions. People may mock your seriousness or your skill or qualifications, or the art form, or even, perversely, the non-culture which ignores the art form. They may offer bitter, ironic, or melancholic comments that wish to defeat or discount you. Sometimes they just smirk a kind of wild fury in their eyes. Often, people use sharp remarks to defend against invisible demons that pop up inside them when they hear of someone else's passion-demons accusing them of insufficient risk, meaning, or passion in their own lives.

Not just Americans. Anyone in a capitalist and market-driven society, which is everyone nowadays, prefers the executive personality. You can write all you want, but only show up with deodorant in public.

I will never forget it because I bring it with me. It gives me confidence when I face all the blank stares, knowing glances, and muted responses when I let slip my profession. The closest people in my life either say nothing or send me grammatical corrections. I don't need approval, agreement, or an audience. Like any and every human, I want someone to care.

You're a writer?! What is that like? It's why writers write so many damn books about writing. We desperately want to share what it's like, to answer the question no one asks.

But I suppose that is preferable to this:

Social acquaintances who know that you write will ask every time they see you, with a mischievous twinkle, how's the writing going? This is often coded for have you amounted to anything yet? Again, they may also insist you hear their latest idea for a book or story. They may even suggest, jokingly yet with an edgy glint, their cut of your anticipated gross should be, for having passed along their idea. If you try to describe the fact that you're presently struggling (to get a story taken, to find a publisher, to find an agent, to find a new agent, etc.), their hiked brows will indicate their thoughts: Hey, I already gave you the most incredible tip of your life. All you had to do was write a best seller like what's her name's. Your problems would be over now.

Why do we bother? Do we march towards our annihilation like Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" because of a sense of duty?

Does the creative side have a duty?

Of course. Frank's title infers it, nay, confirms it: Because You Have To...

The hollowness of domesticity of life, especially with children, takes over and shoves aside all else. And in all of us, the creative dies. I tell someone I write or blog rather, and they respond with either blank whatsit or head-bobble approval that segues to a new topic. I want to ask them: whatever happened to your creativity? To your duty to create? Is it so snuffed that you cannot recognize or respect it in me?

Frank empathizes:

Many years ago, I made the dreadful mistake of telling a cab driver, in response to his asking (en route to an interview at a television station), that I was a writer. May I plead here that I was young and excited, it was my first (and only) television interview, and my then-boyfriend (now husband) rode beside me in the cab. I could have bitten off my tongue within moments. The driver was Polish and in a manic tirade, began to detail the difficulties of transporting many members of his family from his native Poland to America.

It seemed he felt certain that I could publicize (obtain help for) his problems. I felt like an impotent government official, and I felt very bad for the man. He was urgent and loud. And were trapped there for the journey's duration, from inner city to distant suburb. My boyfriend murmured as we scrambled out of the car after a forty-five-minute forced audience: "Never tell anyone you are a writer again."

Zadie Smith admitted her need to write resulted from some psychological quirk, and I agree. Frank explores the compulsion and names it perfectly:

There seems to be a fairly constant wish amongst us to build a kind of coherent, wholesome scaffolding around the essentially lonely, aberrant, and certainly unjustifiable act of writing. I find this impulse poignant-surface evidence of a profound, and profoundly human, need. We're social animals, and we like clubs, affiliations, and, for lack of a better term, cross-pollination.

Perhaps professional development is that term, though I find the word professional troubling. (It suggests a shiny varnish of prestige, which strikes me as arbitrarily broad; maybe a hair silly.) Still, it's fascinating to see the resilience of our urge to connect, even within a group somewhat notorious for its irregular social skills.

There is no shortage of reasons why art exists (Beauty, consciousness, fellowship, and things beyond language). You do it because you must, as Frank's title exemplifies. You are the only author of your authorization.

There is only one reason art shouldn't exist: humanity is dead.

Porcelain walls by Irish ceramist Isobel Egan. Always cold to the touch, attention-holding. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

If you are creative and have struggled thus, Joan Frank knows and names your struggle. But only you can authorize your authorship.

That being said, you're not alone. Comfort your woes and bond your creative fissures with the turned-out advice of Dorothea Brande, a creative writing teacher who, in 1934, thought genius could be taught, or Anne Lamont and Twyla Tharp, the compulsory creatives, or sit in comfort with Dorothy Day's brilliant concept of a connection between the confession of writing and the vulnerability of the soul.