Usually when someone asks what I do, I just say “I’m a writer.” What follows from there varies, depending on their feelings for the written word, which incidentally often tells me quite a bit about them, but I digress…
The point I’m getting to is—what is writing, really? What is the POINT of what we do? It’s goddamned magic. That’s what it is.
Writers are alchemists of everyday life
Writers take the mundanity of life and conjure the sparkly bits out into the open. The bits that make people pause, maybe smile, and feel a moment of connection with themselves, the writer, and by extension—the universe itself.
I don’t care if you’re a poet or an essayist, a novelist or even a copywriter (which in my opinion is for-profit poetry). That subtle work of taking ordinary things and making them interesting is why we continue to exist. From those early cave scrawlings that made fellow cave folx stop and say “ghghgh yess…”, to the social posts of today that make people pause and say, “gugghgh yes…”
We’re simply finding the magic in life that’s ALREADY there, waiting to be seen, and shining our special little light at it, and saying—look at this. Isn’t it something. Do you see it, too?
It may seem like nothing, or almost nothing, but that’s the best stuff
I recently shared a silly story on LinkedIn. It was just that our lawn care people had shown up to clean our yard, when I wasn’t expecting them. I added some color, imagining myself just writing copy for clients without them having asked. It did well, getting more traction than I expected and even resulting in some new business for my landscapers (should I invoice them??)
But it was a good reminder that it’s the little, itty bitty things that just make us giggle, that we think maybe nobody else will even care about, that that often resonate the most. Because we’re humans, and we love little human things.
So the next time I’m at the dog park, and someone asks what I do, I may say magician. Except I definitely won’t.
No, I’ll just say I’m a writer, and see what comes next. Because listening, of course, is where 90% of the magic is. But that’s another story.