Everybody is a writer. Normal people have notepads and biros littered somewhere in their kitchen. Regular humans write handwritten shopping lists and sign birthday cards with a kiss. Everyday beings make notes, scribble reminders and jot down phone numbers onto the back of their lunch receipts.
But writers are not normal people. We’re not everybody. We do not live regular and everyday existences. Writers are romanticisers. We’re fantastical thinkers. We’re the enchantresses of the moment.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
We’re not haemorrhaging blood onto the page for fun, you know. We’ve got a multiverse throbbing in our veins and the pressure to release it is debilitating. The voice in our head is not just our own — in first, second and third person we hear the whispering of tales desperate to be told. We don’t look up at the moon to merely admire the beauty of such a ghostly white pancake — we see it as a springboard for the rest of the universe beyond, where fae realms and historical landscapes and alien worlds are waiting to be born.
We don’t dress like librarians for the aesthetic. We’re wearing the uniform of our people, the gatekeepers of the infinite forever; sentinels of story. Our black-framed glasses are rose-tinted, allowing the magic of the everyday to pierce through. Our tote-bags are Tardis-sized, roomy enough for a library to settle inside them. Our skin is ink-stained, the blood of characters born and lost smearing their very maker.
We don’t carry journals because they’re pretty (they are, though). They’re our second brain, our tangible mind, a place for documentation and immortalisation — a place to bleed out, controlled and contained, so we don’t purge right there on the pavement.
Because stories are pounding at our skin. Chunks of imagination and experience coalescing into protoplanets right there inside our skulls. Our very bones are the scaffolding of a story’s structure, narrative nailed into them and keeping us upright.
We inhale with our senses, drawing in the observations of the natural world around us — and we exhale whimsy. Breathing out preternatural places, creatures, timelines…