Why Can't You Sit Still?

We fight our nervous energy--but maybe we misunderstand what it's telling us. Long ago, when I was a fledgling journalist, I learned from an eminent editor about the concept of . It was a German word, he explained, that referred to the ability to sit still for a long time. "If you want to be a professional writer, you need," he told me. Although it was important to "get out there" and "report," it was also inevitable that I'd have to plant myself at a desk for whole days and weeks, focussing unremittingly on the production of words; many talented writers, he suggested, had failed to progress because they wrote beautifully but not for long enough.