You can’t call yourself a writer if you never write. It becomes another unrealized dream like all the other phantasms never committed to paper.
The calling oneself something, though, is part of the problem. Claiming an identity is the same as becoming a grotesque. There is something about the claim which makes the claimed thing inaccessible; the same way naming a thing attaches to it a little waldo or knob by which we can manipulate it—subsequently altering the thing forever. All our things are waldoed up. There’s no getting at them in a more satisfactory way.
But what of the things of our mind? Ideas. They shouldn’t need knobs, handles, gates, or sprues. They’re the same substance as the mind and ought to flow along the currents. Is it they’re just too low-level?
I think it’s that the sprues come when the page comes. You need something to get it out. The mind won’t abide its substance leaking all over the place. There’s a conservation of minimum surface at work.
But I’m being far too philosophical. I’m afraid of building. Not the foundations. I lay undressed stone indiscriminately. My portfolio is a ruins of crypts, cellars, and crawlspaces with a spar or two jutting up. The joists and rafters remain in my head.
To put it another way, I begin a story, and leave off the day’s work in one continuation, which becomes misplaced. And all my efforts after are digging after that continuation wherever it may be lost, scattered in reclaimed bits, and finding like the regenerate axon jammed up the wrong path, that the once-true way is barred by continual reconfiguration.
I am foiled by the evolution of the universe. No greater a foe, I suppose, in my petit grandiosity, could I find.
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