I’ve been known to say that writing is my gift (I believe God gives all of us at least one). I’ve recognized this since I was a teenager. This doesn’t mean that I can form a sentence with the precision of an English professor, or that I always use proper punctuation. Rest assured that I am far from an expert on all of the grammatical rules. It also doesn’t mean that I compare myself to Hemingway or that I’ll ever be a Joan Didion.
What my particular writing gift consists of is this: a magical transformation which happens to my thoughts when I write. As a thought forms in my mind and travels along what I call my magical pathway, which goes from my brain to my finger tips, it becomes transformed into something so much more beautiful and elegant than the mere thought itself.
This doesn’t happen when I speak. In fact, often times quite the opposite happens: the thought of what I want to say becomes jumbled and beaten along the pathway from my brain to my mouth – the result of which is a masterpiece Mona Lisa being transformed into a page from a coloring book colored by a two year old by the time the words roll off of my tongue. This shorter pathway that is the gift of speaking with eloquence is not a gift I have been given. But the longer, magical pathway from my mind to my fingertips is where my gift resides – though it is only “active” when I am in the zone (other writers will know what that means). That’s the pathway that adds seasoning, gravy, beauty and grace to my original thought, transforming the bland into something full of fantastic flavor as it lands on the page.