I was catching up on the New Yorker the other day and read the article about soccer by Hampton Sides, "National Defense ." The article is about the entire U.S. team but focuses on goalkeeper Tim Howard.

Howard has Tourette's and believes that the syndrome helps him in the game. Soccer also provides a focus for his intensity. But Howard told writer Hampton Sides something I found even more fascinating: he hasn't ever had "fun" during a soccer match.

There's too much tension and Howard can only (literally) let down his guard at the end of match when the "danger" of the other team scoring is finally over. And yet it is clear through the article that Tim Howard is doing what he absolutely loves.

That might seem like a riddle or paradox: Howard loves something but he never enjoys it. But I think it makes perfect sense. Soccer is for Tim Howard what writing is for many writers — including Colm Toíbín.

I read an interview in The Manchester Review in which Colm Toíbín told M. J. Hyland that he hadn’t enjoyed writing any of his books, saying there was "no pleasure" in it. When M. J. Hyland asked Toíbín why, then, he didn’t stop writing, Toíbín replied, “Because I have things that will not go away.”

This spring when I told students in my fiction writing class that I didn't like to write but I liked when I was done writing (something Dorothy Parker said, if I have it right), they seemed surprised and maybe disappointed. But I meant it, and for similar reasons to the ones Tim Howard gives for why he doesn't enjoy soccer matches.

Writing is filled with tension for me — trying to figure out how to tell a story and then trying get what's in my mind onto the page. But there isn't anything else I'd rather think about than my characters and how to tell their stories. No matter how much anxiety writing brings, it's what I want to do.