The Writer's Words

Words.

Words are the writer's friends and the writer's enemies. They make me feel safe and secure, happy and satisfied, and they hold me prisoner until I've written them all down. The writer bending over a piece of paper or the keyboard of a computer is bending under the cutting whip of the cruelest slave master since Rameses II. And the reward is only fleeting, but the reward is heaven. The only satisfaction intrinsic in discovering the perfect word is a satisfaction that lasts for half the time it takes for a pondering to become a realization. It's an elusive millisecond, a non-existent fraction. It can't be measured, it can only be felt. It can't register on a scientific instrument, but it can addict a person so hard that they become a writer for life.

Words.

I can't write them all down. How many words are there in the world? There are more than I can learn. If I want to get anything done, I have to ignore the irritant of the factual knowledge that I'll never even finish skimming the cream off the top of the potential of all the words to know, to say, to read -all the words to write. In the haze of just writing, facts settle into the background and sit there like berry-colored lumps of juicy luminosity shining through a thick fog. They're real, but I don't look at them. I feel them, and if I let myself feel too much of them, it burns. But mostly I blissfully ignore them and just write. I don't want to know how much I don't know, I just want to devour as much knowledge as I can as fast as I can.

Words.

Words can make me wealthy. Words can make me famous. I can be a Homer or a Shakespeare or a Charles Dickens or a J.K. Rowling. The words I write can make people feel things. They can make people laugh. If they're very good words, they can make people cry. The words are tools, they're just a means to an end. Or so I keep telling myself. Somehow, I keep forgetting that the words are supposed to be working for me, and I start serving the words, worshiping at the altar of the words, doing whatever I can for the words, searching for days on end like a lost child hopelessly seeking a glimpse of a familiar face, looking for the right words, all in the hope that I'll get a smile or a pat on the head from those wonderful, wonderful words. I love them, I'd die for them, and they're just spiky black figures on a stark white page.

Words.

Damn.

Who am I? I'm a writer.

Will my words last forever? Will they be forgotten after today? Will they be rediscovered in the far future? Will they have any influence? Will anyone even read them at all?

Who am I? I'm nobody. But feel free to quote me anyway.