Can You Relate?

You’re a writer.

You’re always writing something, whether it’s a list, stream of consciousness prose, a song, a poem, a novel, a screenplay, graffiti on a wall.

You love the smell of stationery and stationery stores, paper, pens, printers, and sharpened pencils.

Ideas for what to write come in floods. You can’t possibly use all the ideas you have. You have lists of ideas everywhere: in the notes function on your phone, on scraps of paper, in a notebook. You’re always forgetting ideas too. You think, “I should write that one down,” then you don’t write it down and forget it. Happens all the time, doesn’t it?

You’re always mulling over something you’ve written, editing it from all angles, adding juicy adjectives, trading one word for another, removing excessive adjectives, and rotating word positions like rotating tires on your car. Okay, not like that. Nobody rotates the tires on their car that often.

You can’t help but read everything you see with words on it (repeatedly, such as that sign on the side of the road that you’ve read over and over again even though you know what it says, or the label on the inside of your refrigerator, or the graffiti outside on the trash bin—your eyes refuse to avoid it).

You love words and languages. You may be fluent in other languages and you for sure know multiple phrases in multiple languages. Latin, French, Spanish, Navajo, you don’t have a narrow attitude toward languages, just an unstoppable love of all words everywhere.

You’re critical but progressive—you may change your harsh opinions of some things once you see the beauty of them. You have a cringe-worthy desire to edit everyone else’s writing.

It’s likely that you have a pet—and if you’re a stereotypical writer, it’s a cat. Are you a stereotypical writer?

You can see the beauty of less than desirable things like blotty pens, old books, and ancient word processors.

Books draw you in and collections of books draw you in sevenfold. You have haunted, and shall always haunt, libraries (though you would probably arrange the books by a different method than the present one). You love collections of books. Wherever books are, you will be.

And you love the sounds of a typewriter. The cadence of tiny hammers and the ratcheting sound of the carriage return is pure bliss to you. Sure, a keyboard on a computer is an amazing thing, but your soul loves the visual and audible thunder of a typewriter being manipulated.