There’s no getting around it. Writers like to hide away from the world on a frequent basis. Sometimes I feel like I could be John Donne’s island man – alone and solitaire, pecking away furiously on my keyboard for hours at a time.

Oh yeah, I have a family. Good reminder. Let’s keep focus.

But writers need to write, and that mean time in solitude, time in one’s thoughts, time to edit and re-read and start over.

As in introvert, writing has become an invigorating exercise for me. When I have the time to sneak away, I love to sit at a cafe-ish place and stare at the ocean when not engaged in some riveting dialogue with myself and my characters.

How can a writer keep balance in their lives and not become so withdrawn from the world that they write about?

The easiest way is to be an indie author who has a day job. I am required to be away from my craft a lot, but I also find that when I do have time to write, I am truly able to get right to it. I never run out of words or ideas.

Perhaps, in some ways, this is the ideal situation – having other responsibilities to pull you away from writing. Too much writing is probably not a good thing. It is probably better to burn with desire to have time to write rather than to have time to write but burn with desire to do anything but write.

However, one thing I do is to never let my lack of writing time to stop me from writing. I accomplish this by writing in my mind. I do this a lot. The other night when I wrote the first chapter of my newest novel, I went to bed dreaming about the characters. Literally. It was quite wonderful, actually. I was getting to know them better than I knew them before. Over the following couple of days, I find myself pondering their whereabouts, wondering what they are doing, and hoping to revisit them soon in their busy lives.

So I guess that a writer can have more than one hermit life. One happens when he or she is locked away from the world writing, but the other can happen right in the middle of life itself – a wandering mind that drifts into the yet-to-be written pages of the story. A writer could take up refuge in his thoughts for quite a while without anyone even knowing. I do that all the time. I may even be doing it now. You can never tell.