What to write

I've written stories (short and long), poems (really bad ones), professional reports, essays, research studies, lab results, excuse letters for the kids' schools, complaints, opinion letters...

... Today I have the honour of writing an obituary. If it takes up 300 pages to write a pregnancy story, a few months in dystopia, a day in the life of high school, how do you sum up a whole person and 104 years in 200 words? (The first answer is, you don't. I cheated and tripled the target.) But still. It's one thing to make up characters and dance them through drama. It's something else entirely to do justice to a real life with all the real love, loss, happiness. There aren't enough words.

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