I assume most writers spend no less than four to seven days a week and copious hours in front of the computer or the typewriter or knuckled down with a yellow pad and pencil bringing their literary characters to life. “Oh, how lonely,” you might mumble to your Thursday night reading group or even to yourself as you whip together a thirty minute meal. Just imagine Leo Tolstoy, for one, whittling endless pencil points and no doubt surrounded by a veritable mountain of balled up paper lacking all the gems that eventually made it into War and Peace. Or take Marcel Proust as another example. You might think that once in the homestretch of Remembrance of Things Past the writer would have little recollection of what he’d caused to occur in the opening gazzilion pages. Or”¦oh, never mind. You get the picture.

To have even modest success at writing takes not only effort but endless hours which, for most, bring little monetary reward. How tiresome, might imagine. But it is the rare authors who sequester themselves in a secluded nook who undertake the long, lonely hours that must be put into writing for anything as crass as money. Oh, the loneliness of it all, you might reiterate to all the engineers, teachers, nurses, techies, dog groomers et al you surround yourself with every day and even on those evenings where you congregate with others of your ilk. (Don’t people of like occupations tend to cleave together in their off hours, too?). Yes, writers fall into lock-step just like everyone else, but it is during those long hours scratching out a plot peopled with characters of every stripe that writers find themselves in the most amazing company.

The best part is an author can give birth to all kinds of people and put them in every type of situation imaginable with as many other characters as necessary to the plot. Put a character in danger and you, the writer, are right there biting what’s left of your fingernails. Set them on a path to true romance and your heart melts along with theirs. As they become part of your life, so you become a part of theirs. Day in and day out”¦hour upon hour. Best friends forever.