Monkey Love Confessions

There’s a Stephen King quote the essence of which states that you either write because you love to — because if you don’t, you’ll smother like a kid with a plastic bag tied over its head — or you’re a monkey. That if you write for money, for accolades, for praise, you’re a monkey. That if you write what you’re told to, write to fill in the copy, write to pay the bills, you’re just a monkey with a keyboard.

If I had Steve’s fortune, I might say that too.

A lot of what I write is to pay the bills. It’s occasionally lucrative, like when I was in high school and wrote term papers to pay for my college entrance auditions, or during a particularly strange and disturbing career slump in the Midwest when I started a resume-writing business. I wrote in someone else’s voice and style; I wrote to fill someone else’s need. I confess: I was a writing whore.

And I still am, like in my current soul-sucking position. But while I love monkeys (especially the green ones), I don’t think I am one. Especially here, in this bastion of self-centeredness, where there’s no good reason to write and possibly no one to hear what I say, and I do it anyway. I confess: I get off on it. A good turn of phrase — even if no else reads it (though God knows, if I think it’s good, I most definitely want to share it) — just turns me on.

It’s a fine line between being a lover and a whore.

“The day the monkey is destined to die, all the trees get slippery.” ~ African proverb