Over at Salon, Cary Tennis replies in his advice column to a woman who recently graduated from a writing program but can’t seem to face up to getting any writing done.

“How can I give myself the kick in the ass that I so desperately need?” she asks.

Personally, I’d be glad to give her that kick, for I had little sympathy for her plight—I feel that if she actually wanted to be writing, she’d be writing, which tells me that perhaps she’s better suited to her job as “a personal trainer at an upscale health club” and should just stop whining about it—but then, she wasn’t asking me.

After giving the woman advice on how to climb out of her existential rut, here’s the final part of what Tennis had to say, which hit home:

Doing it for others sucks us dry. We have to do it for ourselves, for the love of it, for it. We have to give ourselves over to it like giving ourselves over to a lover or to the water, like giving ourselves over to the waves and sinking under. We just give ourselves to it. We surrender to it. We don’t worry about who will publish it. We do it because we need to.

Writers write because they can’t not write.