On Being a Writer

Writers live in the wilderness of their own minds, a world where the thickets of words becomes the most delightful entanglement of all existence. They walk for hours past streams and brooks turning over ideas that others hurriedly pass. The world out here stands as Pompeii with its shadows and ashes, but, the world within a writer peels away a delicate warm truth; writers were born to brush the soul’s heart with the quills of thought. Some go on to leave a legacy for the world to read and reread while others get stuck in this silent forest and its purposeful steps.

It's not that they desire to write volumes of thoughts to store up in bottles that need dusting or casting out to sea. It's more that their blood would atrophy and break off in their veins if they didn't. Writers write to live, thus, live to write. The non-writers in their lives do not understand this dichotomy. They thoughtlessly throw stones at their solitude and rush to haul them back into the real world. The balance isn't easy. Most days are spent on a tightrope grasping to the pole of reason barely keeping their feet in one world or the other. It would be a more harmonious existence if writers chose writers in relationships. Gone would be the need to explain why writing a couple of pages took half the day or that eating was optional. It would be common knowledge that it's not polite to poke a writer when he or she stares off into space to make sure they’re still breathing. Writers would be free to climb the inner trees and leisurely watch their ideas break off and float down onto the page. Yes, they also might forget to go to work or pay the mortgage but that kind of reason would be lost in a relationship between writers.

Writers do not waste their words in conversations; they fold and tuck them into safer corners but do not take their scarcity for lack of love for you or an unwillingness to share. You would be overwhelmed at the David their words would sculpt of you from the white stones of this inner world. It's out of compassion that they hold back and not risk your believing that they’ve stepped over sanity's ledge into hyperbole. Be kind to them. Give them ample moments to wander into these woods for their pens are dipped in the ethereal and they scribe a braille wind blowing through a blind world. They desire to share what they have heard when they can capture your full attention.

Mona McPherson