According to WordPress, I registered on WordPress.com 15 years ago. I wasn’t planning to post anything today, but when this image popped up in my notifications, I took it as a sign that I should write … something.

Alas, words do not pour out of me, at least not onto paper or my computer screen. They whirl around in my head like a cat chasing its tail. As soon as I sit down to write, they vanish, not even giving me a chance to corral some or even a few.

When I do manage to write, it’s with a clean slate and is almost always prompted by something I read.

I am by nature a mimic. I can’t seem to help myself. For example, many years ago when I was a quickly-going-insane-doctoral student, I had a professor whose speech was quite distinctive. She had a smoky drawl that, without intending to, I started to mimic for the pleasure of my husband and other students. One evening I was talking on the phone with another student, relating to her something that this professor had said to me. Before I could finish, the student exclaimed, “My god, Marie, you sound just like her!”

Oops. Unaware of what I was doing, I had slipped into the professor’s speech. From that night forward, I put all my efforts into suppressing my mimicry. This particular professor did not have a sense of humor and at the time, she also held the purse strings of my research assistantship.

My mimicry is not limited to speech. When I’m reading and I’m taken with a particular format or wordplay, I naturally try to imitate it. Not intentionally. I don’t say to myself, “Hey, I really like how that writer develops a sense of urgency with a series of run-on sentences so I’ll do the exact same thing.” No, I think I’m just inspired, but, still, I have to be careful to not mimic the writer. I want my writing to be original … at least as much as it can be given that my slate is never completely blank.

And look at that … I just wrote almost 350 words.