"Oh, you must be...?"

Usually, that's the way it begins. Perhaps some friendly individual will take a look at the writing manuals haphazardly stacked around my little hovel. Mounds of textbooks littering the maze of hallways in my home will occasionally give birth to some volume to be ousted from its nest. The lone text will fall from its perch on a chair or desk to announce its delivery to all in attendance and remind me of the money I had wasted in its purchase. Most of these fallen guides have gotten more use as furniture or as coasters than as literary aids. And as I set some old reference book before my new acquaintance so that he may find some relief from the cold wet glass in his hand, a knowing look will cross his face. His features reassemble to indicate some mistaken sense of enlightenment, as if he's unlocked the mystery to the puzzle I was before.

"Oh, you must be…?"

Or perhaps he takes a peek at the contents of my website. Lists of titles and masked hyperlinks begin to conjure up an excitement to bubble within him. His eyes start to glisten as his irises bounce lightly over brightly colored discourse, as if he has come across some intricate rarity, a find that will afford him a wealth of tall tales about his brush with stardom later on. He never stops to take a closer look, but merely skims quickly over what is evident at the surface. And I'm forced to do the excavating for him.

"Nope. I'm just a dabbler, hon."

"Oh no, I'm nobody, sweetie."

"I'm just playing around."

I'm not a writer.

To type the phrase brings a sense of relief on my part because the expectations of others falter upon seeing it. They no longer expect me to be as witty or as interesting as they once did, allowing me to relax and enjoy what positive attributes or skills I do have now. To be a writer is to be a magician. It is to play with the tattered fabric of space and time in order to create an entertaining spectacle for others to witness. The writer as magician is always the master--knowing which secrets to display and which facts to keep hidden to produce the most dazzling effects of showmanship. The props--his words--are his devoted minions. The spectators--his readers--become his slaves.

The anti-writer, however, is a slave in his own right. Discourse is his master. Lacking skill, the anti-writer cannot dominate the written word. The words control him. They spill from his fingers at inopportune times, scrambling his thoughts so that his communication with others is garbled and unintelligible. Nouns roam the page with adjectives they were never meant to be paired with. Verbs slip tenses as they race across a paragraph. The written word, like any animal that can sense weakness in its supposed trainer, will strain to break free from feeble restraints. And when the anti-writer loses control, the audience is present to witness his humiliation. He is forever chasing after the words he has just let loose, jumping through and across the hoops and hurdles of grammar and storytelling in an attempt to bind them--to force the words into the meaning he wishes to express. He has become little more than a circus act. The words are his ringmaster.

Why, however, do I continue to write when I cannot master the words I have created? I write for the hope that as I travel through the obstacles my words have set before me, the skill will come. I write for the few and fleeting moments that my words are kind, and assemble the clarity and beauty that comes with a passage that has been forged with emotion and skill. I write for the simple fact that to be controlled by one's words is still a more pleasant fate than to have no words at all. I write because I would die if I could not.

Nevertheless, I am not a writer.

Yet.