Just a Writer

I was speaking with two other frustrated writers the other day. To use the term, "frustrated writer" is redundant enough, but we were getting together and commiserating about our love of writing and for us "love of writing" is practically redundant too. Writers, notably new ones, live with the worst lover's quarrel in the world with a mistress that almost always tells them, "no, you do not fit our needs at this time."
I was telling about how I set about writing this Science Fiction novel I'm ploughing through, which was great fun because I got to answer questions, and it was all about my writing! Then the conversation turned, as our friend Wendy-of-the-pink-hair told of how she was getting published! Woohoo! She seems to be a journalist at heart, so she is getting there the time-honored route of doing small jobs on the internet and elsewhere. Well, since my last stint at writing for pay (besides speeches) was doing a few book reviews, I say, "lay on, MacDuff!" She is doing what we want to do and are benignly jealous, of course.
Then she turned to me in a private moment and said, "when I am asked what I do for a living and I tell them that I am a writer, I always feel like I should be doing more than that!" I think I am not miss-remembering that declaration from her; it was burned in my mind all week. The word- your word- is in print, and people pay you! It sounds like nirvana to me.
The word is one of the most powerful things out there. The Bible says it was the very first thing to be out there. Think on what the word does! The death knell of American slavery was rung when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a tiny little book. Barry Goldwater said the words, "Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice!" and resurrected conservative politics. In fact, if it weren't for an urbane little catholic guy named William F. Buckley putting pen to paper faithfully for years, conservatism would have expired even so. And do I need to recite the words of Lincoln, MLKing or Jack Kennedy? We are people of the word, and the information age should make much more of writers than it does.
Granted, many writers believe in the beginning that the world will be a different place when their first tome is published. It does not agree with that expectation, and will not co-operate. Ho hum. But sitting in a university where people pay good money to be told what to do and how to think, I should not be surprised when we three writers get together and pine for the day when important editors get our lives' work and try out the same jive that the professors do. Let others nurse their inferiority complexes. I should have gotten up that evening, taken her by the shoulders and said in my best Oprah voice, "You are a pro! A minister of the Word! You go, girl!"

The Big Fisch
><+> Swims out