The Right to Write

I was surprised to learn that Amy Bishop had been a writer. A serious writer, in fact. What a writer needs most is patience. Someone should have told her that. John Irving should have told her. Had he? Amy Bishop would have been able to figure out everything on her own about agents, about writing, and making it commercially successful. What she needed most, instead, was patience, which is what every writer needs. Nothing in the world is worth obliteration. Didn't she know? Patience doesn't just mean a caring attitude. It also means making a cruel, nihilistic attitude truly one's own. That's the difficulty of patience. As a writer, she must have been extremely sensitive to the injustices all around her, and most of all, to her own sense of powerlessness. Oh, who isn't powerless? But she lacked patience, and that is her own fault. An impatient writer! Pff, that is not a writer. I know Amy Bishop had the potential to create real literature. She had everything, including the misery and the stupid pride and the family and the dark-dark-dark past and intelligence and failure and fate and frustration, lots of it, and ambition and dreams and dispair and an asinine spouse and schizophrenia and imagination and terrible stupidity docked with strange genius, all EXCEPT PATIENCE! Someone, oh please, tell her in jail that what she needed was patience. She has to find out. But now, it is too late. Too late, even to have patience. Stupid professor. That is pathetic. She should have told herself she was a writer first, and a professor second, no matter how the world viewed her. Then, she might have figured out in time that what she needed badly was patience, and as a writer, she was going to have to work on acquiring patience, bit by bit. But instead, she looked the other way. Like a very careless driver. Is it too late for her to write now? I would like to say, quiet, no. Everyone's got to have a chance at writing, even a criminal and murderer. But the world will emphatically say: YES, IT IS TOO LATE FOR HER. She has even lost the right to write. She has killed herself (oh yes, she did), and taken the others with her against their will, for her lack of patience. Why, an impatient person has no right to write. No write to right.