Correct me if I'm wrong

Am I really a writer? Or am I just a diarist for thoughts streaming through, or even just a typist for ideas cascading in from seven windows, ideas that the poor old keyboard cannot express? I prepare to find out...I’ll try a 12 point, Arial Bold, I think, No, a demure 10 pt in Lucida handwriting, methinks again…and in the brilliant world of the alphabet canoodling words of gold with strings attached, strings attached like the spider’s web, to chipping nails and calloused finger tips, I let it rip, putting it out there is worth my while, floats my boat, makes my trip.

I’d like to do a 'Show me the money or your head’s in the duffel bag’ in Bold Capitals-Baskerville old face, of course. 
Arial - too ordinary.No, not even Arial Rounded MT bold. 
Tahoma! - This ain’t no Hawaiian holiday invitation!  
Bodoni MT? Is that a station in Gujarat? 
And, I see there’s an Algerian lurking around. You can even choose between a Centaur and an Elephant for the ride into your wild imagination. 
Rago Italio- is that a pasta sauce? 
Calibri, sounds like a deli cheese. Let’s feast on words, indeed.

So yes, I would like to do a 'Show me the money or your head’s in the duffel bag’ in Bold Capitals-Baskerville old face for my unsuspecting boss, who’ll probably laugh at the joke and look me in the eye with ‘Number your days’ typed on a letterhead in Times New Roman bold. So I dot my i’s and cross my t’s and console myself.  Writer’s don’t work for money, do they? Also, whoever uses webdings, seriously?

Nothing happens. But that's ok. I can wait. I’m not taking the bait. I poach a few apples and let time fly me by. Ah, you know, in the brilliant world of the alphabet canoodling words of gold with strings attached to God as understood by writers..a God called inspiration…sometimes, some portentous times, the phone rings. 

'Yes, hello…What?!  You’re here to see me?  Yes, this is where writers live, Ah, yes, ah, you need directions? Yes, take a right turn at delusions of an artist, stop at the bar, peg a round of drinks on your paycheck, what? They’re belting you out of the establishment? Right. No, don’t take a right, Run!  Leave your valuables, make an escape. Yes, you can grow your beard, change your name.  Do you see a sign board, 'its all a game’…got it? It also says inane things in the sub headline like ‘ Do it for love’, ‘Whatever’s meant to be, is meant to be’.

Are you there yet? Now gather all the facts and narrate these events, be generous with the verbs, and use adjectives sparingly….ah…that’s correct; that is what I just said…put it on paper…well, no? You can’t seem to? Ah, I see, If you can’t do that, you've arrived…yes yes. Of course you can spend some time with us…Do come in, this is indeed where we live, the writer’s bloc.'

Writers are a hard lot to please, something that everybody knows. Ever tried laughter, a joke, any punch lines on them? They don’t really laugh with the masses. They snigger. They play killer whale tricks with meaning, they savour it from all angles, apparent or not, and getting it doesn’t tickle them, it clunks down like coins in a vending machine into a cache of sorts for later use, with a label that reads, I’m onto you.

Serious writers worry me.  It’s not that jokes on sitcoms don't produce the usual guffaws anymore, it’s not even when rubinous verse fails to evoke that glint of immaculate perception in their eyes. It’s not even the absence of the usual sound of a hungry intellect munching what’s left of the brain, to see life alive and squirming, this searing intelligence, that rowdy wit, this exulting meaning of a moment.

No, none of that worries me…I understand… every high has a low, every birthing of an idea is surely followed by a waning moon, the languorous lull of a blank mind, missing status updates, Sorry, the person you are calling is not available. Or if you subscribe to BSNL, Ee number astitva dalli illa.

What worries me, is when expressions turn into stone, into this pale, stoic, gypsum face resembling a war veteran’s statue, unfazed by what existed before all things, unmoved by the prime mover, the origin of All that is: the Word. Yes, writers become immune to emotional expression. They become de-sensitized to the word. They use the word fuck.

Then, the more loaded the punch line, the hollower the cheeks. The longer the lead up to it, the thinner the line of stiff lips.

When writers fall out of love with their muse, they don’t like the opening line, it’s too long. Or the idea is so the done thing. Or literary bravado goes missing, heroes vanish, and chapters evaporate from ink that’s meant to flow at the speed of thought.  

Or you may find pages full of those annoying red waves on MS word that underline your use of words that don’t yet exist. Of course they don’t yet exist dear apprentice wordsmith, duh! And then, it insults the poetry of the moment with suggestions like ‘delete repeated word’, and further suggests geography instead of jeopardy, and you breathe and crack your neck, you breathe again, you patiently ‘add to dictionary’, you ignore, you ignore all…as if all this affords the fullest show of exasperation for minds teetering on the very edge of reason…also the reason why writers have acquired a reputation for being weirdly excitable, suddenly explosive and disturbingly quiet creatures, I imagine.

When writers fall out of love with their muse, memories escape recall, semantic analysis doesn’t yield the damn derivation, the dialectic dribbles, articulation stops mid-sentence and the C word arrives. No, Don’t. Don’t guess it, don’t think it.  Never mention it by name, like Harry Potter says of his mortal enemy.  

The Critic, he is the Valdermort in a writer’s life.  He lives in the same body, walks through the same mind, dreams the same dreams insidiously, he lives to cut, blunt, full stop...to erase. His mission: to cause the crash of the hard drive after the last word.

Writers in the past used to live their lives, the critic begins, not borrow from the lives of others who did. Where’s the plot? Hello! Seems like we’ve lost the plot.  Where’s the hero of the story, where’s the grist? The grime? The grill? The sauce? Where’s the anti – hero, who makes being bad so good that I want to be him? Where’s the serial killer, posing as a lover? Where’s the friend who would give his life for you? Why are you not taking it? And why are you ignoring me?

Where’s the contrarian in the 21^st century? The critic asks, in the same way you would ask, ‘Where’s the bottle of fig jam we got from the market yesterday?’  The critic sees no difference, the profound and the profane share the same origin, ha ha ha, he observes, as if he was created solely to over-simplify and trivialize. You pass the jam even as you hear that muffled voice under his breath, 'Deplorable, yes, yes, the state of writing, deplorable indeed.' 

Sharpen this bit, elaborate that part, oh, that’s so lame, so predictable, so melodramatic, so cheesy, so yesterday, change this here, and that, we won’t need that. A hundred voices, white noise, neurons burn out at the synapse, not a single muscle moves.  You feel the fear and do it anyway, burn those pages, smell the gum on fire and watch the flames. Why? 

Because the author of your life is you.  And because the author of your life, is you.