Writer's Curse

Once you become a writer, and a published friend of mine of long ago, told me that IF you write, you ARE a writer, but if you are, as I say, you enter into a mine-field of controversy. Your pen starts to take on a life that, while of your creative bent, is either more or less, you. It begins to take over and in spite of attempts to quell it, like the hand that moves independently and not always for the good,  it does just that. It moves and writes. An idea comes into your head during those moments that for me are around three or four in the morning and you rise up and sit in the cold, letting the idea run through your fingertips and onto the screen. Sometimes they roll off your hands as though they are the thoughts of another person, but always they insist on being given life. They must be born and borne. Sounds insane? Perhaps. But writers who write whether published or not, know of what I speak. When you have finished your piece and leave the chair on wheels, to get a cup of coffee laced with whatever comfort you habituate, you feel satisfaction and relief. There! The thought lives and has being. It is no longer your property but that of Erato and her company of muses. Life goes on but all that you see, and whom you see, become "material". No one escapes. The world around you is all "material" and it revolves and mixes like a palette gone mad. The colours mix and blend and rise or flatten or swirl or dry, but they are all parts of what you see and hear and feel. They are what ends up on a page of text. You find yourself outside the group, listening, watching all the subtle motions, the choices of words, the eating and drinking, the play, the looks, the conditions, the comings and goings. The faces become over laid on others and the eyes become pools of mystery into which you plunge hoping to find truth hidden there in the depths. While you are there, you are not. You are the observer, the listener, the gatherer of yes, "material". And when you sit in front of your keyboard, the words become the ingredients that form the bread and wine of your next story, your next blog, your next new novel. The pile of manuscripts grows tall and each one in its cardboard shell, needs not to be "published", it is happy simply to exist. Your increasing children in their paper lives, smile and await their siblings to come and join the song that calls you daily to write and live and give them birth.