The biggest thing I miss about writing right now is ownership. I feel a gaping hole when I am not consumed by orchestrating a world, its inhabitants, and ostensibly playing god for every detail—and it’s not simply because I’m a control freak by nature. (Here’s the dramatic, Paul Auster-esque pause where I do my damnedest to laugh with myself, though I’ve yet to figure out whether I’m actually laughing.) Rather, there’s something inherent in the need to pull the puppet strings with one’s imagination, one’s impulse to change and grow and blend and collide and strip down and tear apart and rebuild anew that is, regardless of whether the writer in question is at present creating, inextricable from her identity. Her writer’s soul, if you will. Or, perhaps just her soul if she dares to accept the prefacing title.
The need to preside is the writer’s hemophilia, her own birth defect of sorts. My own.
M
