Found Writerly Advice #9

Death as motivator.

Yours, or someone else’s. Either does the trick.

Faced with your own mortality, you start to panic at the thought of leaving behind unfinished projects, or you actually realize, at last, that life is absolutely finite, and so you want to get your shit done before packing it in. Or a loved one dies and you’re clearing up their leftover life bits and you’re left to ponder about the shit they didn’t get done. Or a stranger dies and you see it, or hear about it, or are perhaps even holding their hand on the side of the road after having pulled them from a burning car and suddenly mortality in general becomes MORTALITY in the biggest, loudest sense of the word and you come away from that rainy dark night with an urgency that you’ve never truly felt before.

Put that to use.

Write it down.

And then keep writing.

Your book doesn’t get written if you don’t write it.