Every now and then, I’m invited to speak to a group of writers. I prepare my notes and deliver my little speech about inspiration and style and the proper use of the semi-colon, and then someone asks the big question, the one I suspect is the real thing I’ve been invited to talk about: “Can you make any money at this?” I have been a freelance writer for 25 years. Except for a three-and-a-half year interruption to edit a magazine, my full-time job during most of those years was to sit at the keyboard and pound. My other full-time job was to raise three children, so it was necessary for the keyboard pounding to have a direct relationship with putting … Read More
The Terrible Responsibility of Words
I am a writer, and words are my tools and my inspiration, my craft and my medium. Still, I do not always know what it is that I think about an issue or a person or a value until I am pressed to speak, and must pause and try to put those ideas into language. Oh, I have a sense about my beliefs and feelings—I have an awareness of what matters to me and how I feel about what matters to others. But it is not until I am forced to transmute those ephemeral wisps of thought into concrete, specific, vivid, precise language that I truly come to know myself and understand what it is that I want to say … Read More