Writing is a solo exercise. You begin a sentence. And then you are lost. For a moment you were up there. The next you are dangling in the air.

Your own making, of course.

No one asked you to do El Captain hands-free and solo. But you thought and thought. Prepared for it. Seized it up. Visualized it all. And now where are you? Nowhere. The most familiar place to a writer. Nowhere. And in nowhere, you are a nobody. A nobody dangling between a word and nothing. Facing the expressionless cliff. Facing eternity. Facing it day after day, staring eye to eye at the nothingness of it all.

Writing is like that. On a good day, if you can write a beautiful sentence, you might feel slightly better, as if you have drawn your whole body and a bit of the soul upward an inch along the cliff, toes and fingers squeezing some crack in the cliffface. And no one to blame.

You are here. Fated to be here. But why not stop? No, I am guilty of innocence. A kind of innocence, a childlike vanity that the world is waiting for you to reveal something: the world. Such Innocence. But innocence, Graham Greene said, is a kind of insanity. You can't stop, because you are beyond reason. The Dangling Man.