I suppose there are two kinds of writers: those who venture forth into the world then tell their tales and those who lock themselves away, mining themselves for an interior narrative that will resonate with another’s. Both approaches are, of course, liberally pocked with pitfalls. Adventures can be a wee distracting, and that great novel you’ve got burning inside you is amazingly easy to postpone. On the other hand, the weight and draw of empirical knowledge is undeniable. And the sequestered author toys with the risk of running out of material or at the very least tweaking it to acid trip proportions.

If you fall under the category of the first type of author, you know it. You’re damn well aware if you’re Teddy Roosevelt ready to rough-ride a pen. There is a level of self-reflexivity with this writer type that is worn like a badge. Besides it’s hard not to notice when your fingertips are turning blue from hanging off the side of a Himalayan cliff. But how many pages have you written?

On the flip side, figuring out that you’re a hermit writer can be a little trickier. I mean, this didn’t happen overnight. And unless you’re either starving or receiving knocks on your door from social service agents called by concerned neighbors who couldn’t handle the smell any longer, you have no flipping idea how Howard Hughes you’ve gone on your own ass. Until. An event large or small forces you out of your hole, and you realize that there was a little item you missed while away, something you didn’t get.

The memo.

What memo, you ask? Exactly.

It’s the memo that would have told you that time had turned its butt to you and gone the other direction, that the smallest atomic matter of your life had changed, that whole children had become adults, that some things had become easier and you were doing it the hard way, that some things had become harder and you were in denial, that one space between sentences had usurped two, that they weren’t called memos anymore.

I suppose the typical reaction to such rude removal from cryostasis is to return posthaste. (It is also my opinion that this is where and why the bottle and the writer often wed. After all, sudden reemergence into light can sure sting the eyes. And licking wounds hard enough can make the tongue mighty parched.) But all is not lost. Emerging and returning form the stuff of the tale of life itself. Do they not? So there you go, more fodder for the page.

You’re a writer. Suck it up. Write it down.