July 12, 2011

Awesome thing of the day: "The Difference Between A Writer And Someone Who Writes"

This is a really long essay, so I'll just copy and paste the first couple paragraphs, then I strongly suggest you follow the link at the end to read the rest. :)
A writer is not just someone who writes. In her head, it’s words all day. She sees the world not as a place made up of things but of words about those things. She knows more meaning is contained in a phrase like “poison friends” than a paragraph-long attempt at comparing emotional pain to a stab wound. A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before. A writer understands the capacity for words to embolden, to eviscerate, to cut a man in half. A writer’s words have texture and an aesthetic – they mean one thing on paper and another in your mouth. A writer knows the word “perfume” has a scent, and “savory,” a flavor. She also knows that the technical term for making you taste her words is synesthesia, but she’d rather show you than tell you.

A writer’s mind is sticky, cavernous. It is a locus of constant invention and generation, but also of deconstruction and warfare. Its very synapses fire bullets between semicolons and periods. In the infancy of the day, or as it’s expelling its final breath, an errant phrase will show up there unannounced and become lodged in some furrow. It will keep the writer up at night, until she’s built a temple, or at the very least, a sand castle, around it.
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