Writing is the ultimate creative process. To be sure, production is all over the place in society: farmers turn water and fertilizer and seeds into crops, factory workers turn random pieces of metal into cars, mathematicians turn axioms into theorems. But there is something special about writing; the words appear out of thin air, with no raw materials evident. They spring into being out of nowhere, their syllables conjured up to produce words like "effervescent" and "oriole."

Even more, the words create a reality. The description of a smile as winsome, the deviousness of a protagonist, the flecked yellow paint of a car; these things don't come from anywhere. They are created by the writer qua deity. The writer is not bound by the tensile strength of the metal, the harsh fickleness of nature, or the iron-fisted parameters of deductive logic, instead being free to instantiate arbitrary descriptors and scenes to prove points or simply effect whatever his or her desired world is.

The advent of computers has only served to make the process more mysterious. When one presses the keys, the words appear on the screen; there is no obvious physical process which makes the finger motions of depressing the keys p-o-l-k-a produce a dance. There is no pencil, no tie to physical reality. The words simply spring into being as if by magic, the deus ex machina of the computer serving to mediate the creative process.

As I type these particular words, I am sitting outside on the marina. Everything is very real. The grass is green; the wind cuts; the overcast low clouds of Berkeley menacingly hover above. If it were to drop, we would all be buried beneath an opaque blanket of mist, a collective time capsule waiting for our savior, the sun, to come out and evaporate the gray menace. The people walking by are real. The kite is real. The garbage can and the gravel are real. And I interact with them the way that anyone would: according to the laws of physics. None of this is creative or individual. Today I will go home and have salmon for dinner, or maybe chicken. Anyone, starving African orphans aside, could make these choices. Anyone could do these things. Anyone could have these hobbies. I could wake up tomorrow and decide to be an introvert, or an extrovert, or a Democrat, or a Republican.

But I can't wake up tomorrow with someone else's words ready to spring. Words are individuality, that which cannot be faked, the one giveaway to the frequently camouflaged personality which everybody puts on more frequently than they would like to admit. No one else is writing this essay right now; no one else will say the stupid things that I am sure to say tomorrow (unless I decide to be an introvert.) When you read a book, you are reading the unique lexemes generated by a specific person, an individual. The plot and the characters may not be unique, but the words are. There is only one person alive (or possibly dead) who could come up with those words in that exact order, come up with them out of nowhere.

Someone may wake up tomorrow and decide to be me, decide to take up my hobbies and my vocation, and buy a gold Saturn. But the words are mine. The words are me, more than anything. This is the fundamental nature one signs up for - everything else has changed, is changing, will change, but the words just pop into my head. The words are the essential nature of the individual.