Emily Belsey

Writers are generally a crazy sort of people.  To name just a few: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Heller (have you read Catch-22?  You’d have to be crazy to write something like that!).

Ann Waldron writes “Writers do behave oddly. They can be monomaniacal about their work, obsessional about rewriting, insecure about any success they might have, paranoid about editors and publishers, riddled with anxiety about their talent. They are often nonconformists.” (Special to The Washington Post – March 14, 1989, pp. 13-15 (c) The Washington Post)

And if you think about it, writers also hear voices.  Voices in their heads, in sounds, in shadows.  And, admit it, they talk to those voices.  All in the name of the art though.

I’m a writer.

Writers do not generally like to admit that they are crazy, that they hear voices and talk to those voices.  Denial or rationalization are thin excuses for the craziness.

I’m a writer.

I bought a cat.  I figure that I can talk to a cat, and no one will think I’m crazy.  They might think it kind of strange, but talking to a cat is also kind of endearing.  Even now, a smile is on your face and you just get it.  You get how talking to a cat, sounding out dialogue, asking rhetorical questions, seeking plot advice from a cat is kind of cute!

So I talk to Chuck.  The great thing is, she can’t tell me how dumb my ideas are or how boring my story is.

She does, however, hurt my feelings when she leaves the room in the middle of our conversation.

That’s the kind of insult only a cat could give.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Chuck, Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.