Words spark excitement in my brain as they jump off the page, passages searing my brain keep me inspired.
To the keyboard I go—either for work or play. Usually for work. Now I play. Here is where the new connections are made as I put word after word together off the top of my head or the tip of my tongue.
Writing is the easy part. In fact, if all I had to do was write, I’d have written 100 books by now. If I wanted to write books. It’s beginning to write that requires the monumental. The space between the rest of my life and my keyboard is miles uphill. The space between have-to-do and want-to-do is miles more.
Once here, once in it, all is possible. Sure, I hesitate; I forget a word; I look out the window for the thought just out of reach. To do so is as much a part of writing as is putting the ‘f’ after the ‘o.’
As long as I’ve begun, I can continue. As long as I continue, I can finish. As long as I finish, someone can read. As long as someone reads, I am a writer. Is that the idea?
If I wrote in a room where no one would know of it, burning the page at the end of each day, am I a writer? Am I a writer if I call myself a writer, or a writer when someone else calls me a writer? If I am a writer of mediocre words that no one cares to read, am I a writer? Does the title ‘writer’ amount to much anymore?
I play with words. I prefer to do so.
I find them everywhere and string them together in my mind, on the page, and of my life. Experiences become immortalized so my mind can’t later stretch and blur details. Etched in stone my stories remain real and factual, what stories I wish to be so—a process that stretches and blurs an entire past based on what details are chosen to stick around. And what not.
Here I am toward the ending stretch: the agony sets in. I write concisely. Extra words feel like fluff. So I fluff my way to 500, and this whole exercise feels like a waste.
403, 404, 405, I can’t help it. To write about writing for 500 words is to make myself sound like someone I am not, philosophizing about the possibilities of what it all might mean.
I prefer to simply say, I play with words; and sometimes, they play me.