30.

Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground.

Whatever opinion I have about the rest of Stephen King's book 'On Writing', this statement gets the most vigorous nods I have in my arsenal. Writing has never been an act of deliberation but one of release. You let ideas come to you and engage yourself with the mundane goings-on of life while they ferment in your head, mutating and evolving organically. All you do is look within yourself, find them and hold on to them, then grab a pen as they trickle down from neuronal space to ink. Drug-addled smoke-spewing alcoholics or not, writers (and poets, and perhaps anyone involved in creative pursuits) are saints of the highest order for being able to find that space inside them unerringly and constantly, and for keeping this space sacrosanct and inviolable.

Inviolable, for you cannot afford an invasion by fear, that most cancerous of emotions, or by the clutter of your everyday life, which dulls your creative juices. Freedom is the writer's fuel, just as freedom is the monk's goal. All you wannabe writers, become saints first. And all you saints, it's time to realise sainthood can be achieved without abstinence. Just ask those drug-addled, smoke spewing alcoholic writers.