More W.H.I.P.S.

Write here, write now. A colleague and I, up at the crack of dawn today to do an interview on CBC radio Information Morning about tomorrow's Write Here In Plain Sight sessions.

First question: Is this some kind of publicity stunt?

Hardly.

As I responded, You have to have NO pride to do this. Writing in front of a roomful of people, whether it's a first draft or a revision, is pretty humbling.

The whole exercise staged to give viewers some sense of how the writing process unfolds in various mysterious and not-so-mysterious ways, different for everyone and always dependent on the nature of the work itself.

I think people who don't write--at least those who don't write fiction--have this naive idea that writers are egomaniacs. Well, maybe some are. We won't go there. Let's just say I am far more inclined to believe writers, most writers, are humble, vulnerable souls who through some odd taste for risk (peeling off their pride as they enter) willingly play make believe.

It's all about building castles in the air. It takes a certain fearlessness and equal measures of faith and craziness to trust an idea, a dream, an image, enough to pursue it, often for years. The best writing--and anyone who has taken the leap knows this--means ditching the ego pretty quickly. Parking it and often losing the keys.

It's like any kind of exploring.

The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.

Just one more thing about writing that makes it hard, that keeps us open.