My friend seems improbably Zen. Which is, of course, a strange contrast to my freeway of thinking.
I sometimes wonder if listening to my machine-gun, interrogation-style conversation is stressful. I’m a horribly active listener—my thoughts tripping over themselves to get at whatever fascinates me.
Like me, he’s a writer. Though he quietly debates what that means when I identified him as such. When I stated, unequivocally, that he was a writer, he told me he doesn’t like labels.
This struck me as deeply contrary to my preferred mode of processing: classify, categorize, and then chase my tail trying to reason why. Eventually I either arrive at a satisfactory conclusion or grow disenchanted and move on to the next shiny thing—determined, of course, to repeat the cycle.
Having issued what I still consider a shockingly correct statement—he is a writer, labels be damned—I then attempted to catch up on what felt like a decade of questions I had somehow never thought to ask.
Like, what do you mean you only write when the mood strikes you? Preposterous.
Understand, I meant no offence. His method—or lack thereof—is clearly working; he has a respectable body of work. It just felt so… lawless. Random. Entirely free of the cyclical dread that I have, at various points, written my last word and will never produce another.
As he systematically dismantled my arguments about what made a “writer,” our discourse remained civilized, respectful—and somehow still utterly mystifying.
How could he write if he didn’t have an internal monologue?
Which, of course, raises an entirely different problem.