The Reluctant Writer

My good buddy Don gave me a book for my birthday. It’s  The Right to Write, by Julia Cameron. I got off to a good start and we challenged each other to do the exercises. I’ve lapsed, seriously lapsed, since then. Was he trying to tell me something?  The second exercise (she cleverly reframes them as initiation tools) was to write positive things about what writers are. Here is the list I came up with:

Writers are mental miners who sort and pick through the folds of their minds for diamonds of ideas, thoughts, dreams, real or imagined memories. We descend into the pit, without the canary, and come back out dusty and somehow a little more solid. Sometimes we even come back up with gems.

Writers are thinkers; writers are dreamers. That’s why we writers need to get out of our heads to have the experiences that will morph into stories. We can’t cajole the characters to brazenly splay themselves onto the page without having done something a little brazen ourselves. Wouldn’t be fair. Or honest.

Writers make money pimping nouns and verbs. “Let my writing, tasty prose seduce you in exchange for dropping comparable monetary pleasure in my piggy bank. Writers often don’t realize that the piggy bank needn’t be small. It’s okay to make money word pimping. A lot of money. After all, it’s the world’s oldest profession.

Writers are business managers with varying degrees of aptitude and practical agility. We manage schedules, budgets, families, mundanity and sublimity. (Probably not real words, but who gives a damn. I’m in full pimp here.)

Writers are procrastinators, or maybe that’s just me.  Or maybe it’s a form of mental constipation. You know, you try and try and wait and wait and nothing comes out. What we sometimes need is cerebral X-Lax; Mind Metamucil takes too long.

Writers are framers.  We frame language, arguments, stories, characters, technical errata, excuses, delays, prompts, and literary grocery manifestos in our heads constantly. The inner monologue/dialogue/mob scene gets so noisy that it spills out onto a keyboard or gets inked in lines and margins and splashed on paper. We frame, explain, reframe, and refine until the words look right on the surface of our retinas and spaces feel right on the ridges of our bones.

Writers seek to be heard and often speak for those who can’t or won’t.

Writers are list makers. We make lists and sometimes the lists make us.

Writers are anyone and everyone with a pen and a desire to make a difference, even if it’s only to ourselves.