SFX: scattered cheers and spring showers, declining in the east toward dusk.


Dr. P.T.F.:

Thank you. Much appreciated. Marvelous.
Put a sock in it. Thanks, Mum. You can go now.

We find ourselves in an age in which one soon realizes that anyone with a computer or a typewriter or a vaguely sharp pencil imagines themselves to be a 'Writer'.

To be fair, the media and the education system have perpetuated the myth that anyone can become a Writer by dint of learning to manipulate letters in a vaguely reminiscent manner.

Dickens arranged letters in a certain order and now he is remembered well beyond his death for that arrangement.

Kipling flung words about on the printed page and is lauded for that flinging.

Various commentators and reporters in newspapers and magazines tot up characters in the English alphabet on a a daily, weekly and monthly basis and they are known and paid for this ability.

Thus, the thinking goes, anyone who can do likewise is thus a candidate for similar notoriety and a paycheck.

Nay, dear listeners, nay, I say.


This is not strictly true.

Everyone who sits down to put pen to paper is not a Writer.


Everyone who cranks out a littered ream and calls it a novel is not a Writer.


Everyone who actually gets published for darkening a white sheet of foolscap is not a Writer.


Everyone who actually gets paid for pounding a poor defenseless keyboard for 627 pages and then gets a movie option and possibly a movie gets made from their poundage is not a Writer.


Nay, dear listeners, nay, I say.


This is not so.

A Writer is what other Writers call people like themselves.

If you are not one of them, then you are not a Writer.

You are a scribbler, a typist, a word processor, but not a Writer.

You can scribble, type, process to your little heart's content, but you will never be a Writer until another Writer says so.

I am a Writer and I know.

Other Writers have been saying so and so about me for years.

So, if you suddenly find yourself having trouble scribbling, typing or processing, do not accuse yourself of suffering from 'Writer's block.'

Only Writers get that, mostly from thinking about all the people who aren't Writers getting their paycheck or getting the book contract that rightfully belongs to a Writer, or a movie being made that shows absolutely no Writing behind it...

In other words, if you find yourself having a difficulty forming characters into words, words into sentences, sentences into coherent paragraphs that form earth-shattering thoughts into a creative aspic of marvelous prose, then that is probably as it should be.

That is the natural order of things.

Some people are Writers.

And some are not.

Take it from a Writer who knows.

Go cook something.

And keep in mind that everyone who fiddles about in the kitchen is not necessarily a Cook...