Whether or not it becomes your career, you don't decide to be a writer. It chooses you. Drawn to words from a young age, you seek out any opportunity to read what someone else has written - on cereal boxes, in any magazine or brochure or book that lands in front of you, even the closed captioning on a television program. When you see a word, you can own it. Parse out the sounds each letter makes, roll it off your brain and then your tongue to make it real. Put it together with other words. Try different combinations to see what gets the feeling and the meaning across. Compose a symphony, each word a musical note, each sentence a different instrument. When you wake up or go around a corner and words or phrases repeat themselves over and again in your mind, you know you are a writer, even if you do nothing with those words except let them float around in the ether.
---
I don't remember learning how to read. I was just always able to put letters together, sound out the words, get a sense of their meanings. Everyone has a thing, something that they just know. Words, I just know. But what can you do with words? You can inform people. You can move them. You can haunt them. The best writers do this so well, and the rest of us just fumble in the dark for a way to tell others what we know. Despite this language that consumes us, we will never be like those whose words are held up high for all to read. It's this art that grips us 'til the end but which we can never seem to elevate beyond scribblings in journals and now musings in whatever public spaces we can manage. There's too much out there that's of too little value, but some of the really good, meaty non-fiction can be found here. With any luck, it could be any of us there someday, although given what some of those writers have been through or who they met to get the story, perhaps it's better them than us sometimes.
