What is writing?

What is writing?

 

Now that I’ve forsaken all else to write fulltime, I’ve actually had time to think about what I’m doing. 

 

In some ways, you are a writer, or you are not. You also have to love books and reading. You have to want to possess books, too.  You need to hold them, look at them.

 

Your biography becomes the sum of the volumes arranged on your book shelves.

 

You need to write down your ideas or they’re gone.  You learn to write on anything handy.  I wrote the first draft of this post in the blank pages located in the back of Larry McMurtry’s Books. My dissertation director wrote on envelope and scraps of paper.  These she arranged carefully and stored in larger envelopes, labeled and dated.  I did the same thing with PostIt notes, some inadvertently left in books in libraries all over the country.  I secretly hope someone will see them and add their own PostIts to the dialog.

 

Writing preserves one’s sanity.  Our characters are the voices in our heads; Playwrights, novelists, short story writers, poets, and lyricists have to entrap their characters on paper, or go mad.

 

If writing is madness, then I’ve been so all my life.  I’ve written and made up stories since I was a toddler, but in college, it hit me. I was a writer.  I to go beyond carefully crated papers, done in Spanish and English for grades.

 

It was in college that I started to love research too, and compiling bibliographies. Yet, there were books and stories beyond the assignments. If followed them, as I would tell my students to do later, and I amassed a large personal library, encouraged by my mother, who never threw away book.

 

I soon wrote in different genres, exploring different authors, types of writing, just a I played different kinds of music on the piano. 

 

Then, I came to love the tools of writing: paper, notebooks, pens, pencils, all kids of writing supplies, even writing technology. I don’t see my self stopping.

 

We either write for craft, proofreading ads or writing for work, or for art, as  writers who want to be read, but whose goal is to write, not to publish for big money.