But wait, before I begin, what is writing actually? And is being read also part of writing, of being a writer?
I am thinking about someone Arthur Inman (1895-1963) who wrote a diary consisting of 17 million words contained in 155 volumes and someone else Robert William Shields (1918-2007) who chronicled every five minutes of his life starting when he was 54 in 1972 until 1997, a late starter you might say, but he made up for it, producing 37.5 million words. he donated the 91 boxes containing his diaries to Washington State University in 1999 on the provision that they not be read (nor the words counted) for 50 years. but someone must have taken a peek because we know that at 7.05 am on July 25, 1993 he wrote :
Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used five sheets of paper.
That is to say, we know he wrote that but not when and we don't know whether his stool was in fact large and firm. He may have been the most prolix writer of fiction the world has ever known.
And so you are a writer you say...
What is your task?
You might say the writer's task is to write the denouement, everyone's favourite part. Everything else is just the preliminaries. The Dutch word is ontknoping which is odd because it means a knot being untied, where the denouement is the part where all the loose ends are tied together, everything is resolved and we can all go home and say, thank god that's over, and go to bed. But to give them credit the Dutch did think up their own word instead of being lazy and pinching a word from French.
But a denouement is for writers of fiction, for tellers of fairy tales. When you encounter the Real, all the loose ends are left dangling untidily and then you die.