Five Years a Writer

Today, a moment of silence to honour the 14 victims of the 1989 Montreal Massacre:  Remember their names . Work to end violence against women .  ———— I had such a good thought the other day on my walk that it was almost brilliant: Writing is like making sausages. What a perfect way to open this week’s post on the writing process. But then I googled the phrase, just to see what might come up, and discovered that, far from original, the idea of comparing some process with sausage making goes back two centuries and brings up more than two million hits — including countless ones relating writing to sausage-making . Oof. And there, dear reader, you have the foundational fear of every writer: Our idea is un-original. Our other ideas have already been thought of, been written about. Go back to the drawing board. Start over. Again. Oof. And so we do. Precisely because no idea is wholly new, we dig deep to weave our own originality into it through the words we put on the page. We hope we can s