Sometime in recent memory the term “a writer” became an honorific. This title, which once was a plain descriptive with no nuance (unlike 'scribbler', 'poet', 'yellow journalist', or 'essayist') now is elevated to a lofty status. In the popular imagination writers are 'sensitive', 'deep', 'tortured', somehow possessed of special wisdom which they are compelled to share with others. I've heard writers say, “I write because it hurts so much if I don't!”
      That is why after 9/11 there was a rush to ask writers of all sorts to write essays and thought-pieces on the tragedy—as if they somehow knew more than others, or at least could articulate it better, and thereby soothe the pain of others who felt but could not speak the words.
     Although I have written four novels, I have difficulty thinking of myself as a 'writer' in those terms. It's too grand an appellation. I have opinions (pretty vivid ones, too) and lots of imagination (not as much as Fellini, though, or even Mike Myers) but I don't think I have any direct connections to the Sublime Truth.
      The title I'd give myself is Tale-Teller, Story-Teller. "Once upon a time there was a boy..." I scatter crumbs to make a story-trail for others to follow. Those crumbs are words, and while any words can make a trail, it's a better trail if the words are tasty ones. So in that way, to be a tale-teller is be a wordsmith as well—another honorific, but one I'm striving for. Writers must begin with a sensitivity to language and the way it works to convey mood, associations, shape and color. The sharper this sense, the clearer the picture a writer can paint in the mind of a reader.
      And that's what it's about—one mind connecting to another, speaking across time and space. Immortality? Even the most ordinary words of an ordinary letter-writer can live on after their creator, and soar into the future. Perhaps that's really why we all want to be writers, and so many of us are, with or without the title. Some of those everyday letters do indeed have the wisdom of the universe in them, entirely unawares.   

Perpetual traveller MARGARET GEORGE, a tenth-generation American, is the author of the internationally bestselling historical novels The Autobiography of Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles, and The Memoirs of Cleopatra. Her latest book, Mary, Called Magdalene was released in June 2002 from Viking Press. The Memoirs of Cleopatra was made into an ABC miniseries in 1999, starring Timothy Dalton and Billy Zane. It has been translated into thirteen languages, including Finnish and Korean.