Am I A Writer or Not?

Greetings and welcome to the porch. There is a lovely breeze flowing through the screens today, which ignites the hope in my heart that the summer heart is waning and we are on the cusp of autumn weather.

Every month, I try to remember to change the thought for the month on my sidebar. Sometimes I forget all about it and two or three months go by with the same quote. I wonder if anyone notices!

Today's quote is from a French poet, essayist and editor by the name of Charles Peguy. He lived a short life, born in 1873 and passing from this life in 1914, which means he was a lot younger when he died than I am now. I probably never read a word the man wrote until today, when I was scouring the Internet for a suitable quote. This one caught my eye because it suits the mood I am in right now. "A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."

Sometimes I feel like every word I try to put on paper requires hours of thought, consternation, and discontent. The ideas are there, but when they come out on the paper, they remind me of those water color paints i used to play with as a kid. The paints looked so vibrant and bright in the paint box, but once on paper, they are watered down and only a dull shadow of the original hue.

I marvel at people who can whip out a blog post in a few minutes, a magazine article in a couple of hours, and a novel in four months. Sentence structure, spelling, and grammar come easy to me, but when I try to put it all in some order that makes sense to the reader, I find myself agonizing over every thought.

When I attended the Greater Philadelphia Christian Writers Conference, I made contact with several magazine editors and so many ideas ran through my head as to what I could write for their publications. Now that I am home, the ideas that seemed so clear then are now hazy and faded. It brings to mind the way a dream is so vivid when you first wake up from it, but as the day wears on, the details get dimmer and dimmer.

Maybe, as I've heard said at conferences, I'm not really a writer. Maybe I'm a person who is in love with the idea of being a writer. If I were a real writer, wouldn't the words come a lot more freely than they do?

That takes us right back to the quote I mentioned above. How many of the great writers of past generations and the current day spend hours expending blood, sweat, and tears over their words? I suppose there are others who feel as I do, then there are the lucky ones who sit down and pull the words out of an overcoat pocket.

Let's see, how long has it been since I wore an overcoat???

Thanks for reading my blog!