You pick up a pen and start writing.
Perhaps a tale of faeries and nymphs,
perhaps an epic of swashbuckling adventure,
or perhaps a poem of rich imagery and theme.
Regardless, you’re writing now.
Refusing to be bested by a mere blank page,
you begin to dream up the words.
You imagine the depth of the prose,
heartrending emotion unleashing
salty tears and deep belly laughs.
Or perhaps only solitary groans of anguish and writer’s block.
Or really indifference and some sort of forced caring.
But you are an author,
and your characters are so beloved that you cannot shut them in.
They are like a fire in your bones that cannot be quenched
until all know their exploits and defeats.
Or so you hope.
Pray….
Coax….
….
Relationships in your head trump the world,
characters demanding your time to distraction.
“Leave me to my solitude and buy a book!”
Or perhaps you wonder why you can’t hear them,
elusive head-people taunting you with their absence,
with tangible people or social media
or needless research taking the brunt of the blame.
The characters must be in there somewhere
“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
for you are a true writer.
But the idea is beyond the reality,
the slights imagined and exaggerated
“because they’re supposed to be.”
So you claim.
An imposter is all you are.
An imposter posing as the authorial idea.
Every true author is.
Right?
Posing as something they’re not until proven otherwise.
“Or perhaps never proved at all.”
But wouldn’t it irk you, dear writer,
to become an awkward, neurotic, obsessive
only to discover that the ideal
you believe in is the true imposter?
…
