PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

The writer that had nothing to write about.

There is this guy who calls himself a writer. He had never write about anything specifically. He usually took his pen and wrote, wrote, wrote. He wrote sentences or paragraph, on the bad times he would just write nonsense words.

Once he came by to a newspaper editor to request a job as a reporter and he was accepted, not because this was a good writer but because it was a not good newspaper.  He was there no for money, no for fame, just because he liked “writing” as he called it.

He wrote senseless pieces, as the report on a seagull crash, or the note on some poker player at a bar. Papers were printed once a week, and week after week he looked for the column he had been writing. He read it; he read it again, and again. Once he told a friend about his job but in special the reading part of his note. His work was writing, not reading.

If he was asked why he liked more reading than writing he answer that because as much as he read more he learned about himself. While he was fine with that nobody bothered him.

As the time went, the writer was a happy reader of himself. Maybe some other person that maybe used to buy all the newspaper on town and read them had maybe come to read his columns. But if he had readers or not he continued to write.

He once told his friend that writing is not to reading, as if they had some kind of proportion. Writing is to make things happen, he continued telling his friend, and reading is to learn what happened.

He never kept the paper, he would just read and dump it. He had no money, barely a bed, a piece of bread in his pocket. But he was a writer that was important enough to him.

The writer wrote about all he could, all he could imagine to happen. That was his magic and charm. He was crating a whole different view of things. The editor was happy to read his note, the light notes as he called them. Maybe is not worth telling that the newspaper was more like a scandal sheet.

There were other writers, real ones, writers that got a lot of money, had sport cars, went to Cancun for vacation and a lot of fancy things, he admired them but did not dare to be like them. He was happy with his situation.

The mystery about this man was how he made his living. As he said, by writing he made things happen. So in some incredible way he was able to live with that. He was a powerful writing magician.

I do not mean that he was an actual magician or that he workout magic, no way. But certain things did happen because he wrote about them.

Apparently a wealthy man read a news in which the writer was proposing an investment in some special bank account. The investor got 15% in profits out of that investment. The wealthy man was so happy to he decided to give the writer part of the money.

Another time he wrote a senseless article about ten reason why to buy a 1983 thunderbird, someone read it and buy the car. The seller asked the buyer who told him about the car, he told him he was convince by an article in the newspaper. The seller went to the writers office an offered him part of the revenue.

This was his way of leaving until newspaper was sold and the new owner just did not accept him. He told the writer that it was about time for him to go along to write somewhere else. So there he was, sitting next to me, pen on hand and thinking what to write about. He did not have something to write about.

 This story was written by Juan Pablo Estrada