Far too often you run into people who had dreams of writing and who, long ago, just decided to give up.  Sometimes, at least I hope, these people still write, privately, at home, when no one is around.  As sad as that image is, I hope it's true.  You see, as someone recently said, "if you want to be a writer, you just have to write."  This is true and to borrow and even older phrase, "a writer writes."

I find it sad when someone seems to have hit the button on their imagination.  I run into people who tell me things like they can't read a book that has anything to do with aliens or UFOs.  I run into others who say they can't read books or watch movies that take place in fictional mystical lands filled with fantastic creatures like you might find in a Tolkien novel or the movies made from them.  For me, this is profoundly sad.  If there is one place you should always be free, and never have chains wrapped around your limbs, is in your imagination.  Even if you are imprisoned and locked in the deepest, darkest dungeons, your imagination should still be able to set you free.  In your imagination you should be able to fly, visit strange planets, imagine amazing lands, and walk the same ground as amazing creatures.

But the world doesn't like dreamers.  Of course, there isn't a thing that's been created that wasn't, first, in someone's imagination or, better put, in their dreams.  You are told, far too young, to stop believing in silly things.  There is no Santa.  There is no Easter Bunny.  There is no Tooth Fairy.  There are no monsters under your bed, now shut up and go to sleep. 

Writers, however, always keep some part of that kid who still hides under his blankets and feels that just by putting all of his limbs under a sheet he will somehow be safe from the monster beneath his bed.  This is where we spend our time when we write.  This is where the magical and the scary and the wonderful and the beautiful comes from and it gets translated through our brain and comes out our fingertips onto the page. 

However, when a writer spends his time writing and writing and then feels that nothing is happenign with it, the temptation to shut off that part of his brain, to wall it in like the character in "The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe, and focus on things like accounting and practical matters.  I think that is a sin on par with the criminal.  That kills a part of you that is trying hard to express itself.

So, keep writing.  Even if you write just for yourself, at least you can keep writing.  You only get better by sticking with it.  I wrote my first work of fiction when I sat down at my mom's electric typewriter when I was in the third grade.  It was a horrible piece of crap, but it was a start.  I am hardly a runaway success, but I just had my eighth book published and I write daily for a living.  So, I am doing something right somewhere.

The road is long.  However, the rewards are great.  Plus, you know there is that amazing joy when you write a short story, a novel, a play, a song or a poem.  You feel it when, after having it bounce around in your head for years, like a rock in a rock polisher, and then it comes out pristine and beautiful like that shiny rock.  Then you sit back and look at your creation and you know it is good.  It is like we have touched the face of the Creator. 

That should never die.  So, write.  Always write.