For the past several months I have been writing…and writing…and writing.

Clutching moments from wherever I can, I must work it into my day, because although I am paid for what I write, I still don’t call it my “real” job. I find myself grabbing snippets of time to devote to pulling together letters that are not my letters but that belong to everyone. The letters that are readily available for anyone who chooses to make words, then sentences, then paragraphs, then pages, then chapters, then books.

Sometimes I worry that there will not be enough time to catch the words and thoughts I want to catch. I fear that others out in writers land may get there first. To those sentences that should have been mine, the ones I am truly thinking but can’t get to type fast enough. The ones scads of others are putting into blogs or posts or pages before I have time.

Today, I don’t click the mouse to see what’s out there before I write, because it will stop me. It will allow me to go to a place that won’t serve. A place of why bother? Why try? Because have you SEEN all those words out there in internet land??

A simple hit on a cursor would afford me writings on anything. Already put together passages are there for the taking on everything I could ever need. Inspiration beyond any I could muster. Information that goes beyond what I could ever gather first, but I don’t want to see it. I just want to trust my typing. And type…and type…and type.

Often I’ve set aside an hour only to find that I am still at the keyboard four or five or six later. When this happens, I have no recollection of time passing. And even though I’ve spent too much already, I think, “Just one more paragraph.”

It’s a trance like state, this place I arrive at soon after the first words hit the page. At the same time, it is both escape and arrival. The sentences form like paint on canvas, but I am no painter, although I’ve always wanted to be. Or wait, perhaps I am. The ink on paper my black paint on white canvas? Are the pages my canvas? Yes, I think so.

My art. It is everyone else’s and no one else’s. If you read it, is it honored? Does it even have to be? No, even if the words are never read, they form art the moment they hit the page. Their editing is no different than a sculptor re-shaping a piece of clay, a painter adding a bit more color or a sketch artist gently erasing. So, yes it is art.

That is why I think I am so drawn, pulled to the keyboard as if it calls my name. I am called to the flow of the letters that swirl together to make artistic statements that are mine. To pull together words that form pictures that wordies like me can understand. Art that feels good and true and whole.

Perhaps what satisfies me is following the structure of a sentence, but only to a point. Maybe it’s taking liberty with the rules learned back in grade school that calls to me. The simple, complex, compound guides to follow that I don’t always heed. Or maybe the underlines on grammar check are what excite me. The grammatical musts and shoulds calling me to keep the color inside the lines, even as I disregard them, provoke me. This breaking the rules while following them is electrifying. It is artistic prowess.

It is a game. One of finding the right way to say something with only twenty six letters shaped and re-shaped over and over. Going at it from angle after angle until you find it and then find it again.

Yes, I am writing. I am writing. I am writing. And for today, there is a big stack of thin white canvasses about to go into the printer. I wonder what will be created today.