After reading events, or when I teach workshops, one of the questions I most often hear is, "How do you discipline yourself to keep writing?"

I'm not quite sure how to answer this one, as it isn't so much about discipline as about forming a habit, or more, a compulsion. Like most professional writers I know I write compulsively, obsessively. I just don't feel right if I don't fit my writing session into the day. There is little else that I would rather do.

I come by this obsession naturally. My mother was a scribbler, a writer, and long before the internet she was so often lost to her own virtual world, the landscape of the writing she was creating in her mind. I remember as a child trying to pull her writing hand away from the pad of paper that she scribbled on, calling for her attention. Now my kids call up the stairs for mine as I tap at my laptop keys.

This was the experience that inspired this passage from my novel, Turtle Valley:

"My mother began scribbling again. She wrote of the conversation we had just had, I know. It was her habit to chronicle even the smallest details of her life immediately after they transpired, but she wasn't present for these moments any more than tourists who view their vacations through the lens of a camcorder. Nevertheless, if I understood little else about my mother, I thought I understood this, because writing was one thing we had in common. I assumed she wrote to preserve the moment, to stop its fleeting, to stop its loss. Of course these were only projections. I had never asked her why she wrote so obsessively. I assumed she was driven to write down the details of her life for the same reasons I wrote: to make sense of things, to give the random events of life meaning, and to remember -- as memory was such a mercurial companion, and one not to be counted on."

Most writers will understand this obsession that I write of here, the act of watching our own lives as if from a distance. This is the writer as observer that we are so very familiar with. We are observers to our own lives. A necessary part of the writing life, perhaps, but one we pay a price for. We are so often not really here.

So this is my resolution for this coming new year, and for the years I have left to me: I resolve to step back into myself as I step away from my laptop; to step out into the world; to be here for myself, for my children, in this moment; to live.