WRITING: Read! Write!

I think I know why writers write. It’s not because we’re not socially communicative–I may not be, but really don’t believe that that’s the thread that links our beads together. I believe that if you have a way of putting words together verbally or in text, you want them to last longer than the minute it takes to speak them aloud. You want more people than your lover, friend, or handful of those within hearing distance to remember your clever phrase, your interesting story–the way YOU told it.

Even on weblogs, a writer feels a little twitch of loss when that great post scrolls off the screen, and really hopes that someone will be led to check the archives and catch it later, maybe years after it was written. He wants to entertain, to touch, to produce a response in another human being, and to be remembered. The thought of wasted words is abhorrent to him.

And for himself, he can’t help but go back and reread his best, the day he proclaimed his publishability, the day the plumber pissed him off and what he told him that was so catchy, the day he wrote so beautifully that he held it privately to himself a little while before he pressed the SAVE button.