.as.a.writer.i.

As a writer, I... I, I, I ... I write? Yes. Write.

No. Not "write." Not write. No pen, no pencil, no paper needed. Used occasionally, but not needed.

Write? Right.

I don't write. That involves muscles working in unison to form words, or to peck out the right keys, if you're me. Nope. Don't do it.

I experience.

I channel.

I express.

I don't write. That's just the mechanics. Semantics, if you will. Grammar and syntax and subject-verb agreement, and then the fingers moving to put it all from a textbook onto another blank, ex-pristine piece of paper. Or notepad file. Either one.

Experience. Channel. Express. I live what I'm "writing"--what I'm putting down in black and white (grey and white if in lead)--so that I can experience it. Every emotion, every scene, every lancing pain and burning rage and disabling moment of grief and unparalleled ecstacy. It's all mine. I take ownership of it, I integrate it, I digest it, I experience it.

And at the same time, I don't consume it. I don't absorb it so that it cannot pass like rainwater down a streambed. It changes me, it molds me, it occasionally strips me down to bare stones and throws the silt down a waterfall--but it flows through me. I am a vessel. A streambed. A pipe. I accept the outpouring of experience, live it, and then let it go.

And it goes. Like water dousing my upturned face, the experience flows through me, down me, changing me, out my fingertips--through this mechanical technique of "writing" each letter on a page--to express. To express me, how I feel, what I experience because I'm channeling because I'm a writer and that's what I do--to express the story, to paint it out in colors and scents and brushstrokes in plain black-and-white with no doodles in the margin to help. All imagination, but mine reaches out to yours and touches it through the medium of these twenty-six little letters that I like to rearrange sporadically when I "write."

As I writer, I...