You Write?

Like drool. Vowels and consonants slip off my tongue splattering on the page. I love it.

His blue eyes are glistening like polished glass, reflecting a youthful energy. A small man with a hunchback and a khaki beret is sitting at a corner table. He can’t be younger than 75. Sipping on his coffee, he is devouring the sophisticated dialogue around him with a blue felt pen and a black leather notebook. He blends into the Tuesday afternoon, he is invisible.

A romance writer in a wheel chair, or a war veteran scripting anthologies about peace, we’re telepathic. Unassuming, we tuck our vernacular in our back pocket and hide behind laptops and headphones. Just another nobody flittering away on a keyboard. But any real writer will recognize when they’ve crossed paths with another.

I watch his wrinkled hand dance across the lined paper, and without hesitation he flips the page. For a moment he lifts his brow and glances at me, acknowledging my presence, before he quickly returns to his scribbling.

Sure, some say that photographs capture a moment, and they do. But words seize emotions and detail, time is imprisoned in a snow globe. Words can be carried across oceans and centuries and languages. From a parent to a child, a leader to his country, a lover to a lover…

Chances are his words will be found in a dusty cardboard box by a nephew and tossed in a garbage bin. But maybe in a hundred years, his journals will be discovered by an aspiring poet and studied in high school English classes.

That is the beauty of words leftover, they allow strangers to climb inside of the pages and experience life from the eyes of Anne Frank’s attic, or a psychologist’s study on biometrics, or the dungeons of Harry Potter. Sometimes great stories can manipulate us into believing our boring lives are boring. Sometimes they inspire us to do great things.

I hate to stereotype (okay, I don’t hate it so much), but TV personalities, musical artists, chefs, whomever… those creative personalities tend to be predictable. But writers, this is why I love to meet writers, they arrive in all shapes and sizes and demographics. Writers are unpredictable.

What is that single quality, which has united writers? Is it narcissism perhaps? The joy we experience when rereading a perfectly constructed sentence? I once assumed it a curiosity; a need to contemplate or analyze, obsessed with solutions and enigmas. But throughout my contemplation I haven’t an answer…. While all writers succumb to the universal, unequivocal, equalizing sport, and our identity is veiled behind semi-colons and imprints. There are no real rules and all is fair game.

I used to believe that I wrote purely for the intent of my content being read. MY content was specifically designed to cater to the woman running on a treadmill with Attention Deficit Disorder. I’d consolidate quotes and minimize statistics; I abandoned color, leaving stories lifeless.

Staring at the hardcover books collecting dust on my bookshelf, I attach a feeling to each title… Even though these books haven’t been touched in years, their guts still make me shudder… I close the pages disturbed or enlightened.

The Internet and blogs are riddled with political dribble; it’s temporary, so transient. Sure, stamp a date on history. But do all these opinions (which I’m equally guilty of imploding) tug on our emotions like tweezers to a stubborn hair follicle? No, we extract a decent catch phrase, but we’re still unaffected. We forget.

Good books don’t condemn or congratulate humanity, but rather examine it carefully. Writing that ignores the brain and instead penetrates the heart is an endangered species. Amazon is bleeding paperbacks with authorial entitlement, outlined with clear and concise arguments – handpicked to coincide with movie releases. But the litanies that trump movies and songs and other art forms aren’t written in a hope to change the world.

These books are simple. They’re just stories about life.

Alone: Joan Didion picks apart the meaning of her husband’s death, and life with honesty.
Denial: F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals the power of denial through pitiful and heartless characters.
Exploitation: Truman Capote investigates his own experiences and destroys relationships to give the world disturbing and exciting stories.
Forgiveness: William Styron created Sophie’s Choice, explicating describes how a mother could logically face her most terrifying fear.
Acceptance: Jean-Dominique Bauby built the The Diving Bell and The Butterfly one blink at a time. He left the world with the thoughts he no longer could say.

I know… I’m selfish. I’m not a super hero, or a starving orphan. What about the tale tailored for the American girl, who is faced with normalcy? Trust me: I'm plagued by safety and education.... I'm spoiled with pop culture's reassurance that I'm executing that "twenty-something" dream.

But, when all is said and done, after my flu shots and vacations and I’ve fallen exhausted into my duvet, I cannot hear quiet…

I’m ravenous, still starving for more. And then I'm reminded that I'm just one of millions... When in the middle of the night I'm stirring and restless and cannot locate stillness with an ambien and a red glass of wine, I put pen to paper and empty the blank pages until my hand aches and I can think of nothing more...

Unlike real estate or accounting or artistry, I realize there is something all writers share.

Writers are hunters. The world is a forest and a plot is the prey and the bullet is our final sentence.

Throughout the centuries and countries and languages I understand that writers are nothing more than nomads. We struggle through unnecessary terrain and question things that have long since been answered. We're stubborn and prideful. But we love, and we love hard.

The old man slowly stands up and tucks his leather journal under his arm. With his watercolor eyes he glances my way, and tips the brim of his hat. I do not know where it is he is from, or where he is going, as I watch him wander away.