Finding pleasure in the challenge of a blank sheet

At the looking- back time of the year, I think of the jobs I was offered -- and didn't take.

Mostly I was offered promotion to editor. Editors make more money than writers. Editors stroll through the city room clasping their hands behind their backs and peeking over writers' shoulders while they write. Editors go to meetings.

I'd respond by saying. "I'm a writer. I want to stay a writer. No promotions please."

Those trying to hire me assured me I could do the job.

I told them I knew I could do the job. I wanted to remain a writer because I didn't know if I could do the job.

Few understood.

Each time I sit down to write I don't know if I can do it. The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can.

E.B. White, the great essayist for The New Yorker, described my fortunate life:

"I'm glad to report that even now, at this late day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me -- more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears.

"I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking: 'This is where I belong, this is it.' Having dirtied up probably a quarter-of-a-million of them and sent them down drains and through presses, I am exhausted but not done, faithful in my fashion and fearful only that I will die before one comes out right -- as though I had deflowered a quarter-of-a-million virgins and was still expecting the perfect child.

"What is this terrible infatuation, anyway? Some mild nervous disorder, probably, that compels a man to leave a fiery tale in his wake, like a ten-cent comet, or smell up a pissing post so that the next dog will know who's been along. I have moments when I wish that I could either take a sheet of paper or leave it alone, and sometimes, in despair and vengeance, I just fold them into airplanes and sail them out of high windows, hoping to get rid of them that way, only to have an updraft (or a change of temper) bring them back up again."

Friends wonder why I do not take it easy. Why I don't play golf or walk through cathedrals in Italy. Because I have an obsession. I write. I draw. I try to capture a fragment of life and reveal its wonder to you. I never get it quite right, but there is a joy in the trying that makes me young at 83.

My New Year's wish for you, old and young, is that you find in the year ahead something you can't do.