Adventures in Not-Writing

One night in 2008, my husband and I arrived late to a dinner party. Dinner was in progress, our empty chairs glaringly vacant, and before I could even sit down, a guest turned around to ask me, “What are you writing?”

“Writing?” I replied. I was surprised. In the dream—this was a dream, although of course I didn’t know that until later—it was clear to me that no one “wrote” anymore, that “writing” was a thing of the past. Everyone knew this. Too polite to embarrass the questioner by mentioning such an obvious fact, I said merely, “Oh, I’m not writing!”

I woke with an almost blissful sense of release. At the time of that dream, I had been a working writer for 34 years. I had published 13 novels—two mysteries, two literary novels, and nine Regency Romances written under a penname—and had been a freelance journalist for the New York Times for more than a decade. Now, for the first time ever, I wondered if, in fact, I could stop writing.

Financially, the answer was easy: yes. Not long before, I had had