I responded, “You’re a writer.”
“Oh.”
Why is it so hard for us to accept the simple truth that we are writers? We writers wake up with lines in our heads that we simply must write down, even if only in a journal, a text message, or a Facebook post.
We also see situations we don’t understand and create backstory that explains everything. For example, we might see a Korean woman with a small child of mixed race, and we can imagine she met her husband when he was in the service, and despite the fact that both their families were against the relationship, they married and gave birth to a stunning child with slanted eyes and light brown skin, straight black hair, and petite hands and feet. The grandparents all fell in love with the child, who then healed both families and brought all the relatives together in a loving relationship. Well, one can always hope that if a relationship starts out rocky it can still end up with a happy conclusion, anyway.
Next we might spot a twenty-something man with a black eye, and our minds instantly conjure up situations that might have brought the fellow into a collision with someone’s fist, even though the guy might really and truly have simply walked into a door left half open in the dark.
Writers write. It’s what we do. If we don’t write with pencil, ink, type, or computers, we write in our heads. If someone cut open our scalps, words would pour out. We are writers. We need to own the fact, be proud of the fact, and keep writing.
Today a friend told me how she woke up with an idea buzzing around in her head, and she simply had to write it out as a story. She seemed surprised by the incident.
