June 13, 2005
I don't really have too much time to blog because I've got two interviews scheduled this afternoon, but I was thinking this weekend about the power of words. My mother always used to prod me into saying "please" with, "What's the magic word?" And I was contemplating this peculiar thing I do for a living and how I might explain it to my kids.

You see, I turn words into money. They're magic words apparently, because they have inherent magical properties. I sell these words to people, who then write me checks. With those checks I do things like pay for food and gas in the car and vacations. This transmogrification of words is a little different than what I used to do in cytogenetics, analyzing chromosomes. In that case what I felt I was selling was my time, which is more valuable now, apparently, or perhaps I just feel more ownership of it now.

On a more cynical note, what I often do is steal other people's words (I call them interviews), rearrange them into a context, surround them with a few of my own words for explanatory purposes, then sell them. The freelance writer as word wholesaler or distributor. Interesting concept.

Of course, in my fiction, they're pretty much all my own words. Or you can argue that they are, in most cases, the characters' words, but let's not go that route today, lest we start talking about the novelist as Ouija Board operator channeling his characters, etc. I don't believe that. I do believe that a certain aspect of fiction writing is a relaxation of those barriers between conscious and subconscious, but I'm not sure I'm channeling anything. The conscious mind talks to the subconscious and vice versa and you get fiction, with the subconscious directing the conscious. Blah, blah, blah. Jeez, how'd I go off on this tangent, anyway?

Anyway, apparently words have magical properties, because you can turn them into other things, like money. (Or eat your words, for that matter).

Best,
Mark Terry