Why We Write

Why do we write? For some, it is the need to get the words out. For some, it is to chronicle the instances in our lives that are so important to who we are. For others, it is the desire to become a published writer; to see our name in print and to forever be memorialized with our words.

Whatever the reasons, we do write. We meet, examine, and give feedback, rewrite, and start the process over again. Maybe we will do this 4 or 100 times, but our need to get it right is overwhelming. We are the epitome of Obsessive Compulsive. We are writers.

It has been said that we have a certain number of words inside of us to use each day. (It has also been said that women seem to have more words than men, hence the entire chit chat of our daily lives. Our posts will dispel THAT myth! ) Writers have memories, dreams, thoughts, fantasies, and issues we need to recognize and put on paper. We agonize over the word, the sentence structure, the punctuation, the next perfect place for a paragraph. We have the thesaurus as a shortcut on our desktop, along with the dictionary. We notice the world in intimate detail, because it just might offer the perfect scene or sentence.

We read copious amounts of books. Our magazine racks are stuffed with issues that are old and outdated, but they just might contain something of redeeming value to our writing. We pretend with each new book in our bookcase that the next one will be our own. It isn’t about earning a tremendous living like Grisham or Brown, it is that we want our resume to list “author” under all the other jobs we have held. We can be biologists, teachers, accountants or loggers, but deep down in the sacredness of our being, we are writers. We have always been writers and will always be so.


Wednesday, February 23, 2011

poem for my girl friend leaning to fly cast

Knot Much

graceful loops and loopy casts
the fly that neither flies nor bites
when cast upon a stage of air
would rather hatch a mid-air snare
than barb a fish that fights

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