This is a question I have asked myself over and over– “if I am a writer, why am I not writing?”
I AM writing, or thinking about writing, or reading some deathless passages penned during my starry-eyed youth. Poetry, expounding on the various virtues and lack thereof possessed by certain passages of fancy…romantic interests with which my life had been wrecked by unrequited love, or various disastrous relationships…real or imagined.
Thinking about writing has always been a favorite of mine.
By “writing” I mean actual seat-in-chair pounding away at the keys, producing Fiction. Non-fiction has always been a form of writing, but not the end-all-be-all of fulfilling the Writer’s need and longing to … well, write. Enthralled by my own turn of a phrase…disappointment at some less-than-ideal piece of work. Who among us Writers has not spent a stray hour re-reading our work and marveling at how remarkable was the phraseology, the genius of putting words together in unique and individual style.
“Gosh that’s good, did I write that?”
Or the flip side of that scenario, where I stare at the page in horror… “Good Lord, I could NOT have written this piece of garbage!”
At this point of this narrative I should say that I have in fact worked as a Writer, newspaper reporter, and writer of countless university-level term papers, I have written about almost everything I know, from Stonehenge in England to ancient pyramids in Mexico. Once I wrote about what happened to bank checks when they were “in float,” which meant from the time a check was written until it arrived at the bank and was attributed to personal checking accounts. (Known in the vernacular as “beating the check to the bank.” )
I wrote about a land-reclamation project which used dredgings from a harbor on Lake Erie, scooped out and deposited in an area a mile out on a cause-way to form a park. Wrote about ghost ships at about the same time; and Johnson’s Island confederate prison out on Lake Erie.
Later, working on graduate degrees in Latin American History, I wrote papers on a vast variety of subjects, including the European Union, Herodotus and other “fathers” of Historiography, and Aztec “Flower Wars.”
The point here is that those feature articles were part of my professional position as a newspaper writer, and as a university student…although I have never really considered these to be examples of “creative writing,” and even though I was physically engaged in “writing” virtually every day in some capacity, I longed to do Writing, with a capital W.
Oh sure, like most writers, I have a novel in the works. In fact, I have FOUR novels in various stages of completion…none anywhere near publication. There is a Civil War novel, a Science Fiction novel, a Murder-Mystery of course, and a Time-Travel work based on the development of Christianity in the New World/Mexico.
Within the dream of dedicated work on those four novels lies my goal of being a Writer. This is what I want to write, although I understand that any readership that I ever develop is much more likely in blogging, working on non-fiction articles, opinion, ranting, and yes, the occasional Fictional short story for a WordPress challenge.
So here’s the thing–if I am a Writer, I write.
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