If you’re a creative writer, you’re a damn liar.
As a writer, what do you make up about yourself? I make up stuff.
I was born on a fast flying cloud, released by a flash of lightning, and turned up naked, carried by a wave, on a distant shore.
It’s an age old story, of course, and I suppose everyone who meets me will have a similar story to tell.
Being a writer I choose to introduce myself in a variety of ways depending on what I believe about the person receiving the information. Therefore, right or wrong, you are reading about my ‘Wizard’ introduction.
If you had not already guessed. It’s a hell of a lot better than saying I’ve turned seventy, have a belly, very little hair, and feel terribly uneasy with my old age.
I tell it this way because I’m a writer, some might say a consummate liar, or a friendly alcoholic. This is what I do, which is to set my lies onto a clean white page and hope what I write is interesting enough that people wish to read it.
That doesn’t mean you must read, of course not, feel free to cease reading at any full stop. I don’t have the luxury of being able to do either. In fact, as you read, you should know the writer is simply editing a piece written when he was fifty.
The worst thing a writer can be is bored when he or she sits down to write. For instance, I can lose myself in a bottle of whisky, or a piece of music, but much prefer to settle down in the depths of graves, mingling with bones, sifting through dust, looking for a story outside a whisky bottle.
It might just be that in such a place I’ll happen upon the heart of a hero, the soul of a herdsman, or the eye of a beggar looking back at me.
Each story visited on the wings of imagination. I could stay and watch each story develop but my mind lives in a transient abode. I run the same course that writers before me have run. Feel the same sun, drink from the same streams, see the same sights, meet the changes they must have met while on their pilgrimage road.
If there is a difference between us, then it is in their dedication to stay with each story.
Not so for me. In the blink of an eye I’m passing Saturn, on my way to Mars, dreaming on the twilight.
The never ending galaxy of imagination offers me enchanted visions, plunged as they are in mystery and future callings that curdle with religion, family, and native lands.
I’m carried on a child’s tear, crossing boundaries no spacecraft could endure, away to places where sunshine and rain are but words in a distant library, pleasure and pain just a velvet memory.
The lunar electricity that distances me from the behemoths rutting beauty, is carried by inspiration toward a life force of the future, before being exiled in bottomless journeying nights shrouded in the violet fog of words somewhere beyond the correctness of grammar, or the semicolon’s right or wrong.
There is no hope for me, a drunk transported on the adventures of his childhood, soaring on the heights of those youthful fighting days, riding the genius of trouble and the bad temperedness of old age.
The sailor who set every sail without intention of ever turning back. To do or die.
Naturally, the man supping a pint, leaning on the bar, checking in with himself, might prefer to write something other than the ‘Wizard’ introduction.
The woman, sipping a Martini, her eyes curious, would almost certainly prefer the ‘English King’ introduction…not the ‘Peasant’, though perhaps the ‘Knight’ introduction?
The Martini sipping woman with curious eyes dares a glance in my direction. Maybe she would like the ‘Masseurs’ introduction, but it’s a little too early in our acquaintance and anyway, I’m still learning to master the erotic.
So look, all I’m saying is this; you better have a good story for me when standing at a bar, having coffee on a sidewalk, or you’ll never see me again…it’s the price of befriending a writer!
This one, anyway.
