Writing

Writing's a dirty habit, like picking at your skin or collecting half-full mugs of coffee all over your room until the penultimate domino effect causes you to have to change the carpet. And like most dirty habits, it's usually the result of you not having been taught better, and it's a little bit fun.

It also tends to embarrass when it spills into public life. Taking notebooks out at restaurants and parties can cause people to look over at you like a street-mime, even come up to and demand to know what you're doing. Evidence of literacy may show up in conversations. I'm one of those hapless individuals who attempts to have conversations like people in books do, and it's frustrating for me to find that real life conversation includes a lot more interruptions, a lot less soul-searching, and the wrong questions.

I've heard writing described as a psychosis. Bit sinister, but a certain deliberate insanity is involved. Writers make a world with which to view the world. They make characters and the characters in turn, make the writer. What characters get up to reflect the hopes the writer harbours about the way the word works: that in the end everyone deserving gets married, or killed, that glints of humanity shine off even hearts of polished stone, that God, in His own good timing, will give the plot a kick where necessary. It strives to be less common than muck, to find new ways of saying old things. The desperate optimism of being a writer at all is enough to break your heart. We are people who believe, on some level, that words can change the world, and want ours to be among them.