WRITING

Little Writer Ants, What are You Writing Today?

Kettle attack or just another tree walk?

Ants are amazing, aren’t they? Huge amounts of them live as one superorganism, communicating by sound, smell, and their antennas in ways we don’t quite understand.

They all have their own jobs, whether they’re soldiers, scouts, queens or workers.

I don’t suggest for one second that there are, but what if some of those ants in the colony were also writers, writing their pieces and transmitting them through their antenna to the rest of the colony?

Would those ants be useful to the colony? Which ones would be most useful?

Some might write about their days, eating leaves and walking up trees and how they once found sugar that weighed five hundred times its bodyweight, which it carried home to its partner who’d had a hard day milking the aphids.

Yup, ants do milk aphids.

Some might write about what to do when a kettle of boiling water gets poured into the nests, and suggestions about how to prevent it or deal with the aftermath.

Some might try to solve other ant problems. Or some might branch out further and help some caterpillars with their cocoon anxieties by interviewing some butterflies.

Meanwhile, others will just do it for the ant money and write a load of pointless nonsense, but also maybe accidentally help some ants on the way.

I don’t really know to be honest, because it’s a silly idea.

But if it wasn’t, then what? Then I think the successful writer ants would be the ones writing about the kettles of water rather than the ant who walked up the tree and found it particularly interesting that day. I can’t see how other ants would enjoy that. It would be more interesting to interview a butterfly, though, and of more use to the caterpillars.

Some ants would write about ant-writing, and some would write about ridiculous ideas, like the idea that tiny microscopic creatures all had jobs and some of them might be writers, and wonder which of them would be the most successful microbe writers.

I suspect it would be the ones who were useful to the other microbes, and didn’t just write about their experiences floating through the air.

I wonder.

All the other ants and insect friends would all be wiggling their antennas looking for what to read, all looking for something that resonates with them.

Some ant pieces would help a whole load of ants if just a little. Some would bore a load of ants, but change the life of just one worker forever, or allow a caterpillar to settle into its cocoon without a panic attack. Either way, that writer ant has done a good job.

I’ll never be the queen ant, and that’s ok, as long as some ant, somewhere, is having a slightly better day because of me. That’s why we do it, isn’t it?

Well done, little writer ants. Well done.

Alexander M. Combstrong is a screenwriter, actor and film producer. He has a degree in psychology and hates writing about himself in the third person. He writes mostly in psychology, personal growth and mental health.