This is the 1st in a 5 part series of posts based on an interview with Patti Digh. Read other posts from the interview»

A couple of years ago, I was with my business partner, David Robinson, and we had this week where we were framing our work and what we wanted to do in the world. We asked ourselves things like: what do we want to do in the world, and what’s the work we want to do together.

Late one night, he said to me, “Help me understand why it is, when somebody asks you what you do for a living, you never say, ‘I’m a writer.’” And I said, “Oh, I’m not a writer.” And he said, “You’ve written three books and published hundreds of articles. What bar would you have to have reached for you to be able to say that you’re a writer?”

So we went to this lunch the next day, and a guy just turned to me at one point during lunch and he said, “Well, Patti, what do you do?” And I, of course, was all puffed up with this conversation from the night before. So I look over at David and I looked back at the man, and I said, “Well, I’m a writer.”

And I started smiling. And the guy says to me, “Well, what do you write?” And I said, “Oh, I just write these little essays every Monday.”

So after lunch, David says, “So what’s up with just writing little essays every Monday?” So I think it’s real easy for us to minimize what we do in the world, and that was my best sort of personal example of how I do it.

There’s a story in the book about desire lines. The architectural landscapers use this phrase, desire lines, as a descriptor for those paths that are off the concrete paths. So when you’re on a college campus, for example, there are these dirt paths that people start creating, because that’s really the best way to walk around campus.

So that’s a metaphor for this idea of desire lines. Do you spend your life going on the concrete path because that’s what you think you need to do, or do you make your own line, do you follow your own path? I had felt for a number of years that I was having an out of body experience when I would go speak. Once I was studying at Penland School of Crafts, this beautiful, incredible craft school in North Carolina. And yet I had to leave my two week class for a day to fly to Dallas and do a very high powered business speech for a major financial services firm. There was such a contrast between who I felt I was as an artist and who I was as a business leader.

So there was a certain feeling of coming home or coming into myself when I started writing that was much more connected to who I am as a human being and not just as a business person.

Honestly, I would like to go back into a room with good lights, and white curtains, and a breeze blowing in it, and I would sit there and write for eight hours a day.

I would like to get back to writing with the kind of urgency that I had when I first started “37 Days.” I think it is very easy to pull ourselves out of intention, and to start focusing on things that are not really linked to that intention.

A lot of people write to me and say, “Help me understand how I can build a successful blog, ” or “How many followers do you have on Twitter?” How many books? How many cities did you go to on your tour? How many? How many? How many? I think it’s very, very easy to focus on things that are easy to measure, but don’t really matter.

There’s a great quote: “A writer is someone who longs to say something.” That’s a true description of who I am.

Patti Digh blogs at 37 Days. She is the author of Life is a Verb. Follow her on Twitter.

Published Monday, June, 29, 2009