Not surprisingly, professional writers often respond to that question with figurative comparisons--metaphors, similes, and analogies like these.
Writers are like . . .
- . . . blotting paper: they soak up impressions and use them.
(Gwendoline Butler, interviewed by Mary Hadley in British Women Mystery Writers. McFarland, 2002) - . . . vacuum cleaners, sucking up all that we can see and hear and read and think and feel and articulate, and everything that everyone else within earshot can hear and see and think and feel. We're mimics, we're parrots--we're writers.
(Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Pantheon, 1994)
- . . . squirrels. We collect these things that we need to get through the long writing winter, or decade or three decades. But if you talk about it, you explain it, you've used up that particular possibility in yourself.
(Norman Mailer, quoted by William Safire and Leonard Safir in Good Advice on Writing. Simon & Schuster, 1992) - . . . detectives, and the facts they unearth merely their clues.
(Carole Angier in The Arvon Book of Life Writing: Writing Biography, Autobiography and Memoir. Methuen, 2010) - . . . sailors in the time of Columbus--we set sail, but we don't know where we're going or what we're doing--and we just land somewhere.
(Alice P. Buening, Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market. F&W Publications, 1996) - . . . bomb-throwers, whether they attack with dense academic prose or jazzy riffs of stream-of-consciousness writing. Every writer wants his words to inflame, to reach across that great abyss, also known as the space between people, with his words.
(Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers, 2nd ed. Riverhead, 2010)
- . . . those screamers who yell at you in the street, shouting the same phrases, the same words again and again and again, convinced that someone will stop and reply if they can only just get it right.
(Francine Prose in Three Minutes or Less: Life Lessons From America's Greatest Writers, PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Bloomsbury, 2000) - . . . eremites or anchorites--natural-born eremites or anchorites--who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place. Why am I so isolate in this strange place? . . . And how have I become so enmeshed with words, mere words, phantoms?
(Joy Williams, "Why I Write." Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals. Lyons, 2001) - . . . baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
(Robert Frost, quoted by Peter C. Bjarkman in the introduction to Baseball and the Game of Life: Stories for the Thinking Fan. Birch Brook Press, 1990) - . . . greyhounds chasing a metal rabbit they know they'll never catch. They're forever pursuing a literary horizon: trying to reproduce the book in their head, knowing it can't be done. . . . One reason that writers have such reverence for failure is that it keeps them going. Were they ever to "succeed"--write the book they set out to write--would they dare to try writing another?
(Ralph Keyes, The Writer's Book of Hope: Getting From Frustration to Publication. Henry Holt, 2003) - . . . sharecroppers. We writers work to produce the crop, deliver it to someone else, and they give us what they decide is right. They run the land, they own the cotton gin and the company store.
(Alex Haley, quoted by John Egerton in Shades of Gray: Dispatches From the Modern South. LSU Press, 1991) - . . . other people, except for at least one important difference. Other people have daily thoughts and feelings, notice this sky or that smell, but they don't do much about it. . . . Not writers. Writers react. And writers need a place to record those reactions.
(Ralph J. Fletcher, A Writer's Notebook: Unlocking the Writer Within You. HarperCollins, 1996)
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