Empty hours invite. I am rested, tranquil. On this holiday weekend, the world is still. Such a chance! I pause paralyzed, like the fat boy in the candy shop. So many choices! How to decide where to send my mind?

As a boy, empty hours spooked. I had to be doing something. How about playing the piano? Or organizing my coin collection? Or an adventure with my dog? Reading, yes, I loved reading, but was reading "doing something"? "Doing something" meant making something, not losing myself in what another had made. My ego needed to impose itself. I had not yet learned to write.

Writing, which resembles those boyhood activities, establishes its own reality. Writers are emperors whose commands cannot be gainsaid. It is so if they say so. Thwarted egos take to writing, dissatisfied with the world as is. Yes, we want to entice, delight, but aren't these mind control, the opposite of a disinterested gift? The abler the writer, the more an enslaver, with their wiles.

All art is a contest between two psyches, but literary art particularly. A wary reader resists a writer's takeover attempt. The writer devises a sneak attack with the unexpected: a new idea, a surprising analogy, curious harmonies. (Beauty always startles.) Readers’ defenses weaken as they scramble to catch up. The antonym of beautiful is not ugly but obvious. Any writer who fails to waken me to something new I have bested, ousted.

I survey my shelves and mind for fresh perceptions. Nothing declares itself but the need to express prods so let's get started. Occasionally, if one’s lucky, conversations graduate from the bromidic to the prophetic. One thing I know – and you cannot – is my momentary truth. How might I rope you into my immediacy, so ripe with significance? Let me tell you a secret! (Who doesn't lean in to hear a secret?)

Accurate speech startles, a verb or modifier so apt we see anew. (Clichés disgust, unless deployed ironically, making them new.) Metaphors bark the brain to attention, a lesson from Shakespeare. When Dr. Johnson deplored how, in the metaphysical poets, "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together," he missed the mark. It is not the yoking that offends, but the unpersuasive pairing. If a comparison feels forced and absurd, fuhgeddaboudit, but when the contrast illuminates both, wow.

I try never to write a sentence I wouldn't like to reread. Make every word work! Strunk and White mistook adequacy for fluency. A sentence is not a dull mule hauling a cart of meaning. Harness Pegasus if you can. Risk much for fizz.

Prose must work harder these days, now that its popularity’s been superseded by images, moving and still. Taking pictures is so much easier than evoking, but the result is purely sensual, not thought-provoking: celebration, not cerebration. Cameras lack claws to dig past the is to the why. We admire a picture, but it can't make us think

Words scrutinize their users. Why is this writer telling me this in this way? To divine a painter's, composer's, or movie-maker's motivation is to superimpose speculation, but a writer confesses willy-nilly. The truer the words, the more they reveal. Curious who Shakespeare was? Read him, he's all there.

Writing about writing may seem narcissistic. I'd argue otherwise. We are what we do. That means, we are how we do. Our attitude toward our work reflects our attitude toward existence. Love loves always, not now and then or here and there. God brought me into being to write. That sounds bonkers -- to me, too -- but it's how I feel.