I Rest My Case

 

In the wee hours, when I am the only one awake, I use my old Webster’s dictionary.  It doesn’t ding when I open it.  It doesn’t accidently ring with a wrong number.  I get to keep working and everyone else gets to keep sleeping in.  The house remains quiet.

Here’s the thing; I can’t take a picture with it, I can’t look up the latest news headline, and I can’t talk to it.  All it can do is show me the correct spelling of words and what they mean.  Yes, perhaps you’re right; these are things I should already know.

Well – I can explain that.  You see, being a writer – my words are my tools.  There are more tools than will fit in my toolbelt.  I can only carry so many tools around with me.  Just like a carpenter may carry with him a hammer, a level, a square, tape measure, and one of those flat pencils that won't roll away when he sets it down.  I have to lug around very heavy nouns, extremely fast verbs and many, many conjunctions.  That, my friend, is just the tip of the iceberg. 

That doesn’t take into account the insane amount of punctuation needed to construct a single paragraph, and there could end up to be thousands of paragraphs within a simple story.

So you see, Timmy – unlike the carpenter who has to carry enough tools to build a ranch style house, a writer must carry tools adequate to construct story upon story, and not just with straight lines.  There are also twists and turns and even without a door he can find himself in a jam.  

 

I rest my case.