Whenever somebody asks me what I do I tell them I’m a writer. It’s what goes on my tax returns and anyplace else that calls for me to declare an occupation. But I’m not being completely honest when I do that.

I am a writer who doesn’t write. I admit it. I know other writers. I read about other writers, and I am not like them. They write. I don’t. I have a perfectly good explanation for this though – I can’t stand writing.

Most of a writer’s day entails sitting in a chair doing nothing. Well, not exactly nothing, but at least nothing worth writing about. Some writers are superstitious and obsessive compulsives. They might have a certain kind of paper pad they have to use with a particular brand of pencil. If they don’t have those things, they can’t work. Others need to eat a special meal for breakfast, or wear the same thread-worn hat they were wearing twenty years ago when that first novel poured out of them. I don’t waste my time with those kinds of things. Every writer has his style and I have mine.

I write with a gigantic Webster’s dictionary laid open on a reading table at my right elbow. In the more than two decades of my professional writing life I have probably wasted five years of it in that dictionary. I turn to a fresh page first thing when I go in the office so that the paper will age evenly. It’s a ridiculous gesture. I mean, we’re not talking about the Guttenberg Bible here. It’s a Webster’s. They sell them at Barnes&Noble. But what this does is reveal a new page each day, and I require myself to read the first word in the upper right hand corner.

Today’s word was gnomist : A writer of aphorisms. Interesting. What the hell is an aphorism? Better look that up.

All the way back in the A’s…A-c, A,-e…aegrotat now there’s a word: An official note certifying that a university student is too ill to attend lectures. I could have used a few aegrotats back in the day. What was I doing? Oh yea…aphorism. A-h-i-j-k-l-m-n-o….Here we go… aperture, apex, aphakia.. aphasia: Loss of the faculty of using or understanding spoken or written language. I know the feeling. Let’s see aphesis, aphetic, aphid – here it is, aphorism: A terse saying embodying a general truth as in “Art is long, and life is short”. No. kidding.

It’s procrastination pure and simple and if feels good somehow. Why not doing the thing you’re supposed to be doing feels better than doing it, I don’t know. I should write about that someday. But in the case of my dictionary addiction, I know exactly where the pleasure comes from.

When I was in junior high the librarian -- whose name I forget but let’s just call her Aphasia Goddess of Death -- ruled the roost. You were expected to sit with your book and make no noise or sudden movements or risk losing your capacity to understand language by a sharp blow to the head. However, there was one exception that would allow you out of your chair and that was if you needed to look up a word in the big dictionary splayed out on a lectern at the front of the room. You’d write your word on a scrap of paper, raise your hand to show it to Aphasia, and by her leave, go to the dictionary. It felt like you were getting away with something and I became expert at selecting books chocked full of words that no seventh grader would be expected to know.

And this is how I formed my love of word-smithery – as a way to fool the authorities into thinking I was smarter and more engaged than I actually am – A maneuver I have spent my life perfecting.

And the dictionary is the least of it. At one time my work space was in a recording studio that had a grand piano. I didn’t play piano and I couldn’t read music. But after three years of avoiding writing in that space I could do both. Believe me, I am no genius. That’s just how much I hate to write.

In recent years I keep my writing area in a room over my woodshop. I’ve been a carpenter and amateur woodworker my whole life. Lately I am getting really good at it. I even had a piece of furniture I designed and built featured in Fine Woodworking Magazine – which is the woodworker’s equivalent of seeing your story in the New Yorker. But I’ll never see a story in the New Yorker. Not as long as I keep calling myself a writer anyway.

You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. I’m seven years late delivering on my current book deal with a major publishing house. The Beatles produced everything they were going to do in that amount of time. I’m sixty pages into a novel I can’t even bear to think about and I have no idea what I spent the advance on. Probably woodworking tools.

Now here’s an idea … what if I started calling myself a woodworker? I could take a bunch of orders for tables and chairs and cabinets and lay awake at night wondering how to get it all done. Then, everyday I come out to the shop I could sneak upstairs and waste a bunch of time writing.

As heard on XM Radio's Bob Edwards' Show
May 8 , 2006
www.xmradio.com