Good as Dead

by Susan Walter

That perfect balance of needing a job and the job needing me. Now

Turns out that when you’re not in the choke hold of debilitating pain, being alive doesn’t completely suck. I’d kind of forgotten that. The Vicodin-induced full-body numbness had the unexpected side effect of refreshing my memory.

have the ability to create whole worlds. Writing is a superpower. Writers conjure human emotions—horror, sadness, exhilaration, despair—simply by arranging words on a page. Churning up a person’s emotions is a great responsibility, and I have never taken it lightly. When I was just starting out as

Writing is listening. It’s spiritual, in the sense that what I write is not of me, but rather flows through me. Flipping on my computer and greeting the blank page is an act of surrender—like saying a prayer—then humbly trusting in God’s sacred gift.

Creating is a dance with the divine. The blank page is the invitation. The ideas are the invited guests. I use words to wrangle them. It requires skill and faith in equal measure.

Original stories are a tangle of what is divinely offered to you, and everything you’ve learned, felt, observed, experienced. Put more simply, you need to breathe in to breathe out. Living is breathing in. Putting words on the page is breathing out.

The sum total of your things is a road map of your life. They show where you’ve been, what you accomplished, who you loved, who loved you back. They are an expression of who you are. You can learn a lot about a person by their things.