What is a writer? Today my creative nonfiction students discussed essays suggesting that the writer is like a museum curator, a spelunker exploring an unknown cave, a prophet, or a healer, and we tried to develop our own brief metaphors for the writer's task: an explorer, a problem-solver, an advocate for social change. One student suggested that the writer is like a timepiece always reminding readers of the passage of time, ticking the moments from present to past as we hurry toward the future.
It wasn't an easy exercise. "Writers do too many things to fit into one sentence," said one student, while others struggled to find original ways to sum up the writer's task without resorting to cliches. I rejected my first attempt because it was too obviously stolen from a poem, and my two next efforts didn't quite satisfy me but when time was up I shared them anyway. Six writers sitting in a classroom struggling to write a single sentence crystallizing the role of the writer...this is who we are. This is what we do.
And you?
2 comments:
Did you see the Andy Rooney segment on 60 minutes on Sunday? He considers himself a writer, and he had some eloquent and well-expressed ideas on what that means.
No driven car is without a driver, all written words have a writer; all driving, but only some writing, transports.
D.
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