Dear Mr. Keillor,
I'm an English teacher in a kindergarten in Po-hang, South Korea. I got the biggest laugh from your comments about life not being that bad compared to being on a roadtrip in a car full of small children! I'm a writer too and I want to ask you, How do you manage to take the time each day to write and overcome the laziness, the self-doubt, and the many distractions of life?
- Nebraska Boy
Dear Nebraska,
Laziness is a gift and part of any civilized life and one should enjoy it to the hilt especially as you get older. A writer spends a good deal of his time in lazing around and thinking and contemplating things in an unregulated way and any writer who doesn't is wound a little too tight. In the end, what drives a person is some sense of duty to one's own gift such as it is (and a guy my age has a lot of shame for having wasted his gift so flagrantly) and also the dread of boredom. I used to watch TV and don't anymore. Lost interest in pro football. Don't do any business entertaining. Don't read books that don't interest me. You throw a lot of this junk overboard and it opens up large lovely expanses of time in which you can do what truly interests you-in my case, writing prose fiction and doing radio. Simple.