A Writing Meme

Here is one I made up myself. If you’re a writer and so inclined, consider yourself tagged.

1. Do you have a favorite writing instrument?

2. Do you imbue said favored writing instrument with special powers; for example, the ability to jump start your work?

3. Are you superstitious or analytical about your muse?

4. Is it better to write or to have written?

5. There is a certain celestial alignment present in many famous writer’s astrological charts. Whether or not you believe in astrology, is there something different about you that made you a writer?

My Answers

1. Yes, but there are more than one. Not being able to lay hands on one of my favorite pens or perfect pencil is my version of the end of the world.

2. I saw an interview with a famous actor who longed to be a writer and he said he kept buying Mont Blanc pens but they hadn’t made any difference in his ability to write. I thought, what a dope. Does he think the magic’s in the pen?

On the other hand, when I want desperately to move something in whatever story I’m working on, I work on it in longhand. There is something sensual and satisfying about putting pen (or perfect pencil) to paper that never fails to nudge problems aside.

3. I’m not superstitious about the muse because I trust it. I don’t, however, analyze how or why it works.

4. To write.

5. Someone asked me recently, how long I’d been writing and I replied, since kindergarten when I learned my ABCs. I remember making up stories in my head when I was very young. I was nine when I wrote the first one down.

I don’t know what makes one person love language more than the next. Or why some people can read a book and move on, and others read a book and think, I want to do that too.

I don’t know why writing is a joy for some and torture for others.

I don’t know if my facility with words is genetic like blue eyes, or a choice, like blue jeans.

I don’t know if being a writer puts me at some special juncture on the spectrum of being human or if it’s just a blip within the standard deviation.

I don’t know if the heavens aligned on the day I was born or if some hitch in genome pointed the way or if I woke up one morning and said, that’d be cool.

I guess that makes me different from all those who didn’t.