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The Great Speech to
All Non-Writers We write in our heads, on pieces of newspaper, on cocktail napkins, vacuum
cleaner bags, magazine covers and envelopes that are supposed to be used to mail
the payment for the electric Should life be too demanding or that dreaded writer’s block should hit, a
writer unable to function will launch into a cleaning frenzy, eating frenzy or
episodes of preaching about the unfairness in the government, the high cost of
milk or how there aren’t enough tiles on the kitchen floor to justify anyone
walking across it and would it be okay to just tear the whole thing down and
construct a shrine to Orson Welles instead? Writers, especially of fiction, are constantly escaping to worlds of the
fantastic, strange and bizarre. By allowing the Muse into our lives, we
have no control over where our imagination takes us, from the life of a blind
paraplegic to the social injustices of a world dominated by 2-foot-high
mind-readers that change anyone with impure thoughts into mushrooms. We will have ourselves arrested, subpoenaed, court-martialed and threatened
with the death penalty if it means we’ll get our story written. We’ll
allow ourselves to be ridiculed, finger-pointed and probed by aliens if it means
getting the inside scoop. We’ll spend hours or even days frantically
rewriting a paragraph or a single sentence, arguing with ourselves about whether
a character would really do something like that or about the philosophical
aspects of reading Playboy only for the articles. We’ll starve
ourselves, neglect our financial responsibilities, smoke an entire pack of
cigarettes, freeze ourselves, stop (or start) taking medication, convert to a
new religion (our tenth so far), wear adult diapers in order to forgo running to
the bathroom and even spend all day wearing only our pajamas as we furiously
scribble our musings. We will read any kind of book from our own growing library, magazine ads,
billboards alongside a highway, flyers that kids bring home from school, those
pesky pop-up ads on the Internet and even the ingredients listed on a box of
Ding-Dongs. We do this because we love words, we can’t get enough of
them and, more important, we need to know what’s out there. If somebody
writes an article about a new drug for HIV-positive individuals, we want to know
about it so that we can use it for a reference in an article we plan to pitch to
an editor. If someone writes a short story with an ending that is
seriously lacking, we’ll pick up the slack to write a new, revised version of
the story. We never take anything at face value. We ask why, what if, who, where, when, what, who says and how. Even explanations given are questioned. When writers are told that the Earth revolves around the sun, they ask why. When they are instructed on the intricacies of gravitational pull and galactic paths, they ask ,"Who says?" When they are given actual, visual proof, they ask, "What if that’s
not what’s really going on?" Suppose, a writer would postulate, some
invisible, celestial god was doctoring the pictures or video footage so that we
couldn’t see that the Earth actually revolved around Pluto, not the sun, and
that the only reason why we couldn’t see Pluto, and instead saw the sun, was
because this god had placed a curse on all humans for shunning the magical
powers of their right big toe. |
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