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To be a writer to begin a journey of romance, adventure, incredible highs and earth shattering lows. It is all there at your fingertips - the power to move, to inspire, or to bore dreckless. To be a writer is to fall in love with words - and to grow sick of them, utterly hating the blank page that refuses to reveal them. It is to burn manuscripts in a passion of of thwarted creativity, and to bitterly regret their loss later on - but mostly, it is to write and write, until your eyes are burning, your throat is dry, your fingers numb.

It's easy to be a writer, sportswriter Red Smith said, "All you have to do is sit at the typewriter and open a vein." That's if you want to be a great writer, the kind of writer that people clutch to their hearts, repeating quotes as if they were the mantra of life.

Then there's the rest of us. We catch fire on occasion, get decent gigs because we have worked hard and paid our dues, now and then someone says, "I wish I had written that," and we glow with pride. Greatness may be beyond us, but we all have a story to tell, and a unique way of telling it. And that is also what it means to be a writer.

In my cultural tradition, storytelling is an essential activity, and good storytellers are revered. Whenever family and friends gathered together, the stories would flow, and I grew up listening to them, as some listen to mythic legends of ancient worlds. To be a storyteller, it seemed to me, was the highest of aspirations.

True storytellers carry their stories in their heads. Writers, I discovered, live in a paper world. Yes, even in the computer age, there are piles of clippings, hard copies, editorial correspondence, copy paper, notebooks, jotting scribbled on odd scraps like the backs of business cards, and yellowing old print outs. "Yup," a colleague once said, observing the bulging file boxes, "you're a writer."

These days you can add computer add ons, disks and hard drive folders. Paper or virtual paper, it's all the same. Writers are packrats, saving words like some people save candy wrappers or beanie toys. They might not be worth much to anyone else, but they are precious to us.

To be a writer, you need to know words. You need a good dictionary and a Roget's Thesaurus, because the right word is not always on the tip of your tongue. You can get them online, but there is something about seeing on them on your bookshelf that is so comforting. For most of us, they are old friends. If you write - or hope to write - journalistic pieces,

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