Another oldie but a goodie

This is from about a year ago, too. But, it will help to fill the pages:

What makes a person a writer?
This is a question many writers themselves have tried to answer. Perhaps there are a series of smaller questions to answer in the process of finding out.
I have heard it said that writing is like, um, going to the bathroom. When it’s time, a writer has to do it. He has limited control over the process. I have never really bought that theory, though.
I just saw a movie about the singer/poet Leonard Cohen. I really knew very little about the guy, except that my wife, Hallie, loves his deep, deep voice.
During the documentary, a whole bunch of people, including Bono and The Edge from U2, talked about how Cohen’s words affected them so powerfully. Bono said something about his writing exploded with colors and textures he had never seen before.
Cohen takes a long time to write anything. He revises it and revises it until it’s just right for him. Even so, there are those songs or poems that even he admits never came out right.
For contrast, how about Bob Dylan? He seems to write in the moment always trying to capture some ethereal now, whereas Cohen is always reflecting on something that happened in the past.
There is a clear difference in approach, but both men are singer-songwriter-poets. What makes Dylan write, and is it so different than Cohen’s inspiration?
Ring Lardner and J. D. Salinger tell their stories in distinctive voices, much like Cohen’s or Dylan’s.
Salinger captured the mind of the teenage outcast Holden Caulfield in “The catcher in the Rye” a decade before Dylan and Cohen were writing songs about being outcasts.
Salinger’s work is a lot like Lardner’s, except that Lardner had a different sense of voice. He wrote stories in the form of a baseball player’s letters home to his friend Al. It was said that Lardner’s writing captured the American voice like no other.
Ray Bradbury, a very different writer from the generation after Lardner, talks about the joy of writing. He talks about writing a story every week for his whole life.
He talks about the joy of reading, too. He waxes nostalgic about how the books he has read take him to places he could never go. Certainly, Bradbury’s imagination does that for his readers, taking us to places like Mars and to events like sinister carnivals and even inside the minds of people.
A college professor once said that Alfred Hitchcock understood the human mind like no other person. Hitchcock is not a writer in the traditional sense, but is a storyteller in much the same way as the others. He “wrote” with the visual images that moved in narrative form across the screen.
How about a comics writer like Will Eisner, who draws his inspiration from writers like Lardner and films like Hitchcock’s? He tells stories visually in narrative forms, too, only he uses his drawings to propel the reader across the page.
For all the people who were praising Cohen, there’s just as many, and maybe more, who will praise the others listed here. And, there are so many more writers out there who are beloved for their creativity.
What makes people love a certain writer, I think, is that he or she opens the reader’s mind to something they want to let in. The key is the reader’s complicity. What makes a certain book appealing at one time of life may render it uninteresting and useless before or after.
So, what makes a writer?
A writer is a person who is willing to put down on paper those things that make him a human being. For a reader, a writer is someone with whom they have something in common — a shared experience or a shared belief or a shared image.
There are a lot of us readers out here looking into their worlds for insight into our world. We should welcome their vision.