Going Inkless

     Some stories come to you out of nowhere, demanding to be committed to paper.  Some characters just drop in on you like unexpected house guests and take up residence in your skull until you agree to tell their tale.  I think that every writer has probably experienced this kind of inspiration.  It's what moves many to embrace the calling.  Later, at times when the writer sits down to consciously create something, it can be maddeningly frustrating that similar inspiration isn't on the same timetable.      But those flashes of ideas aren't really from nowhere.  Although the concepts may seem new to you, they are really the product of your own brain working without your conscious direction.  It's a feat of ordinary magic that your mind takes in disparate elements from your life and your environment, mixes them together and presents you with something you didn't even realize you were thinking about.  We all do this, write...

     Writing tends to be a solitary activity.  We may be able to perform it in crowded places if we're lucky enough to have the focus while riding the train or sitting in some common space.  When you come down to it, though, the actual act of stitching the words together into meaningful patterns is all done alone in your head.  With that basic fact established, I will also say that writing is more social than most other things you do alone.  For one thing, writers of fiction tend to walk around with all sorts of people in their heads.  Even when we are alone, our minds are often working in social ways.  But the aspect I wanted to examine in this post was the camaraderie among those who practice this solitary art.      While it could be said that authors are in competition with each other, you rarely see them behave as if they were.  There is a realistic limit on how many books may be published in the world, and...

Somewhere in my early teens, I suddenly came to the realization that I had quite a few stories to tell and not so much time to do it in. I had always been writing and had always followed creative sparks in other arts wherever they lit up my imagination, but this moment was my epiphany. Moment is the appropriate word, too, because it was that sudden. One minute I was more or less typically shortsighted as other kids my age, and the next, the sky opened up and dropped a sense of mortality on my head. There was no apparent impetus for the revelation, no sudden winking out of a young life that presaged the thought. All at once, I just knew, and it seemed like the knowledge had been lurking in the dark corners of my mind all my life, that there was somewhere I was supposed to be and I was running out of time to get there. Some people might classify it "a calling," and I suppose it could be, but to me it's always been this weird little thing that happened to me when I wa...