Are You a Writer or Just a Person Who Owns Too Many Notebooks? A Quiz for the Perplexed

1. How many of those notebooks have you filled past page 15?
2. Who is your audience, and what have you done for them lately?
3. In 25 words or less, explain the distinction between “write” and “revise.”
4. Should you need to evacuate ahead of a wildfire, what provisions have you made to transport your notebooks?
5. What’s the difference between writing and raising tomatoes?
6. Where did Deirdre leave her glasses?
7. If they arrive simultaneously at an intersection, which has right of way, the pen or the keyboard? Please show your work.
8. Explain your relationship with the blank page.
9. Last time you rushed to the ER, did you grab a notebook on the way out?
10. Who wrote the Book of Love? Did you score a signed copy?
11. Which came first, the metaphor or the sting of the word on the tongue?
12. When telling the truth slant, what is the optimal angle?

Title adapted from an essay by Sabyasachi Roy posted on the Authors Publish web site, May 8, 2025.

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Merrill Oliver Douglas’s first full length collection, Persephone Heads For the Gate, won the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, SWWIM Every Day, Verse Daily and Whale Road Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York.