NaNoWriMo Day 7: If life gives you mashed potatoes

There was a section in my paper this weekend called "Why I Write." Reviewer Jeffrey M. Anderson interviews San Francisco author Andrew Sean Greer. In the interview, Anderson asks Greer, Why do you write? Greer responds,

Always a hard question. What springs to mind is Richard Dreyfuss in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." You know how he is sitting there at dinner and can't get an image out of his head, just can't get it out, and he begins to make a pattern in his mashed potatoes with his fork. Then he mounds the mashed potatoes. Days pass and he has built a huge mound of soil in his living room; he doesn't know what it is, what it means, what it accomplishes, but he has been compelled to do it. That's what it feels like to write.

Seven days and 13,000 words into NaNoWriMo 2005, I can completely relate to his answer. Can't you?

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