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"I don't think she's done yet," I say, referring to J.K. Rowling and some recent rumor I heard that suggested she had said the Harry Potter books would be her first and her last.

"Why? She's already made so much money. She doesn't have to write anymore."

"It's not that," I answered, images and half-developed characters swirling through my head, a living mass of incomplete pieces of the stories I have yet to write. "She'll write because- it doesn't turn off. "

It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't write. The way a phrase or quote will strike you as brilliantly beautiful, or a scene from everyday life will pour words and images into your head. I also draw and paint, and for me, writing is little different. It is creating with words this ideal that swims inside of you, begging to be freed or captured on paper. As a teenager, I would write poetry in the dark, words jumbling unseen against lined paper, notebook after notebook. As long as I didn't look at them, I could spill the excess emotion out of me. If I let it back in, it would fester. A song lyric could twist and expand into an entire story, completely unrelated to the lyric except for tone. When anything good happens, I want to write. When anything bad happens, my hands itch for a pen. Emotions pour more easily out on paper than they ever could from my tongue.

I had a conversation with my mom the other day. She herself had poked around at writing stories when I was just a child. "I look around this new house- at the paneling on the wall, say, and there are these creatures in the wood, urging me to pull them out and draw them, write their tales." I shook my head. "I could sit for hours, staring at the wall or the carpet, enthralled inside my own head!"

She laughed at me. "I do the same thing. And once you see them, they're always there, begging you to do something. It could be a tree, some people at the store, anything- then people always say to me, you always have a story for everything, something to say or relate. I can't help that they never lived or had imaginations!"

Yet I know, its not for lack of imagination. It's as though a writer's mind is wired differently, with extra neurons firing. To spin a tale is not just to string words together, but to draw someone else in and let them see what is in your head. The writer's mind is a deep and bottomless pit where things boil and erupt, or a calm pool begging to be stepped into. When there is not a pen in my hand or a keyboard at my fingertips, I am no less a writer. Sleep does nothing to calm my overactive brain, and sometimes I wake filled with words and exhausted despite the rest. Characters become as well known as best friends- sometimes moreso. Sometimes the words run out as if someone else is writing them, transmitting them telepathically- and perhaps they are, for who am I to say where they come from? Other times it is a struggle to put language to the feelings or paint out the landscapes in letters. And even when the words will not come, the stories, the thoughts are still there.

I can't imagine what the world would be like if I didn't write, if my mind wasn't constantly full and overflowing out any creative channel it could find. A writer writes, you see, because the mind needs to be drained, even if it's never emptied.

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