Sage Words of Wisdom

If you're wondering why you haven't heard from me much recently, it's because I've been working of late on a column that someone actually asked me to write.

No, this person is not related to me by birth, marriage, or that summer-camp voodoo mess that made you blood-sisters for life, or until the next time you washed your hands.

Yes, I have been asked to refrain from dropping the f-bomb more frequently than tropical thunderstorms shower upon the rainforest.

I'm not sure who-all out there among you loyal chuggers of my Kool-Aid is a writer, so maybe this is just preaching to the choir, but writing. is. hard. Especially when you're worried that your new, specific audience will think you are any of the following: dumb, flippant, rude, arrogant, condescending, or at worst, a mean girl.

Fine, you guessed it. The White House hired me as a speech writer/style consultant.

When I was growing up I was always writing things, and I remember once wandering into the kitchen at home, having rammed head-first and at full speed into a cement writer's block in the middle of finishing a story for my creative writing class (which, by the way, broke my soul and kept me from writing for another eight years). My dad, one of the most creative people I know, asked me what was wrong. I told him that all I had to do was cap the story off and I could be finished, but it was just so hard to find exactly the right words. Or at that point, any words at all.

Dad looked at me and said, "Writing is easy. Just sit down and cut open a vein."

That is even more true advice than the time that someone told me that if you just don't touch your hair while it air-dries, you'll get the best curls ever.

I think of Dad telling me that every time I sit down to spew words, and they won't even trickle out. I feel like I'm sitting in front of the keyboard, trying to open a vein with a plastic picnic spork. Or, as a friend of mine from high school once called it, a bat-spoon.

Le sigh. Truth hurts.