The Romance of the Written Word

Never being sure exactly what will happen when I sit down to write can be scary, but it's exciting, too, and an encouragement that the romance isn't completely gone from this business, art and calling of writing. That blank page, whether it's on paper or the computer screen, is a perpetual fresh start, a chance to reinvent "story" over and over again, that mystery of creating, like a baby being born each time, filled with its own unique life yet taking after someone else, or maybe more than one person. What will this day, this writing exercise, bring? What will the novel I'm working on become? At what point will it take its own path and lead me, instead of the other way around? In a kind of "writing to learn" way, that's the give and take, the yin and yang of writing, where it's as much about the writer being shaped by the words as the words being shaped by the writer.