I won’t sit here and say I write a thousand words a day, every day. I don’t. Some days, I write MORE! But most days, I write less. Some days, I don’t write at all. Those are the days I believe I’ll never formulate another damn sentence. Sentences are stupid. Sentences are for felons and miscreants, not me. On those days, I go for a long walk and kick myself for not writing.
On the days I write five thousand words, and the keyboard clicks until my fingertips feel bruised and battered, I think myself to be the next Hemmingway, or Lewis, or Bronte, or Insert Dead Author of Choice. I sit smugly and ruminate over all the books that will line my shelves.
Until tomorrow…. Then, I plink on the keyboard and the next thought will not come. The fiction dries out, withers under the too bright sun of future casting, becomes parched in the Death Valley recesses of my brain, hides behind the hypothalamus, and refuses to play across the page.
So, I trick myself. I tell myself I am only writing for myself, and I don’t care who reads the words or if anyone ever reads the words. I will write the way the quilting obsessed make quilts. Like my grandmother, for example, who made quilt upon quilt until each of her offspring and each of their offspring received a small horde of hand-sewn fabric squares devoid of backing. The day we grandchildren received them, we sat and marveled at the agility those fingers must have had in the days before we knew them. Fingers able to stitch consistently and finely. Each thread was a testament that those hands were not always gnarled by arthritis and capable only of clawing at our cheeks as we said goodbye. Those artifacts proved that the wizened old woman entombed long ago was once younger and more able than we might have been on our best day.
In that way, I write. Yes. I write. And I want to be read. Primarily, though, I want to be known.