Funnily enough, it's been two years since I last wrote for a living, but I still call myself a writer.

Heck, I still think of myself as a writer.

And I'm seriously considering taking up writing again as a means of putting food on the table. Having tried other ways of making a living, I find that writing is the one thing I can do that seems least like hard work. Everything else takes a great deal of effort (which is not to say that I cannot do those other things, just that I find them HARDER to do!).

I've always subscribed to the Confucian saying that if you find a job you love, you'll never need to work a day in your life; so, well, maybe something to do with writing is the key. Although I don't love writing the way a friend of mine does:

Writing is so much more than putting your train of thought in words. When I write, I feel transported, a kid again, playing with my King Kong toy.

I never feel like that. For me, the lure is the desire to get my thoughts across to the reader, helping them to see what I see, making them understand what I think and how I feel about an issue. It's about presenting ideas clearly, producing what journalists call "clean copy" -- a piece that is tight, coherent, smooth-flowing, and comprehensive -- a piece requiring little or no editing. It's about telling a story so well that the reader gets caught up in the story and forgets that it is made up of words, because all he can see is the story.

When I manage to do that, I feel quietly satisfied, as if I've done what I was placed on earth to do. It's almost as if writing were my raison d'être.