Listen to Jim:
http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/
or read on…
THE WRITER GOES AROUND TATTLETELLING TATTLETALES
I am a tattletale.
Can’t help it. I tell tales, but I also in the process rat on people.
I out you and your foibles, vices, beauty, shallowness, brilliance.
I sneak my pen around the page when you are not looking, and immortalize your idiosyncracies and your heroism.
I am a transcriptionist.
I copy you down and tell others things you may not know about yourself.
I tell things you wish I’d keep secret.
I praise you when you don’t even recognize your praiseworthiness.
I describe you so accurately you can’t even recognize yourself in the story.
I tell on other people and you suspect I’m talking about you.
Sometimes you are jealous of me.
Sometimes you secretly admire what I do and wish you knew my secret.
This flabbergasts me, because I don’t know my secret—
I just write and let the fingers and the page and the pen and the gut and the heart tell all.
If I try to force myself to write, it’s like trying to squeeze toothpaste from a flattened, spent tube.
If I try to backtrack and edit or expurgate and obliterate what I’ve written, it’s like trying to fill an empty tube with toothpaste. It’s always too late. What’s written is written.
I am a tattletale, but nobody escapes me. I can’t even stop writing things about myself that I don’t want you to know. It’s always too late.
I out everything when I write.
I tell the future, I look back to the future, I tell the past, I look forward to the past.
I am a writer.
I fictionalize the truth.
I spy the truth in fictions.
No matter how I write it, it comes out true, it comes forth as truth.
I write because I can’t lie.
I write because somebody has to tell the truths that only I can tell.
I am a writer, and I can’t go back and change that fact
© Jim Reed 2014 A.D.