If there’s one activity to which I do not devote enough time to allow myself a necessary and daily catharsis, it’s writing.
I
read others’ writing, I listen to others’ writing, I dream every day
and every night about my own writing becoming a being of its own and
reaching an audience beyond the innards of my mind and stirring hearts
and minds beyond my imaginings and beyond perhaps what my writing could
stir in my own heart.
I love my writing, and it is dear to me, to be true!
But
it seems there is something about being a writer that takes a good deal
of the “fun” out of the process of writing – though others are quite
pleased by it and perhaps even sometimes impressed by it, as a writer,
the process is merely one of expressing what is already extant to the
writer in his or her own head – and therefore, there is nothing
particularly special about the writer’s words to the writer him or
herself.
But perhaps I underestimate the writer.
To be a
writer requires a certain heightened state of mind in which every
movement of the earth, every breath of nature, every nervous tic of
every person in a room becomes part of the writer’s soul, so that when
he or she goes out to a pub or walks down an avenue attempting to clear
his or her mind to allow even a brief respite from the stress of
awareness, the exact opposite is occurring:
if the writer accidentally slips on a wet spot of pavement, it is indeed no accident.
Perhaps
it may not seem like much at the time, but later, when the writer
allows his or her subconscious to guide the writing process, a character
may end up slipping on a similarly wet fragment of pavement and,
because of this seemingly unfortunate event, be accosted by a passerby
who is incredibly attractive or kind or soulful and become profoundly
attached to this passerby – perhaps enough to fall in love with him or
her or seek to learn more about him or her.
Or, perhaps, a writer
sits alone at a table consuming a pint that drained him or her of his or
her last finances and notices, across the room, that a man who entered
the pub merely moments ago slips a nondescript piece of paper to the
host at the front, which may not seem like a magnanimous occurrence at
the time (and could indeed just be the admission of guilt by the man
about his infidelity to his wife, who has entered the pub with him, to a
young girl who trusted his seemingly charming words and his
unexpectedly kind gifts - the gifts of a frustrated husband who married
for all the wrong reasons) – could culminate in the largest epic work
that the writer has ever felt the confidence to undertake or that the
world itself has yet experienced in one thousand or more pages:
It
is these extremely tiny details that compose the organic elements of
any work of literature or even a small piece of writing, and it is these
details that impress the general reader and yet seem obvious to the
writer as he or she goes through his or her daily life –
Writers are a unique species.
It
is amusing to me when so much time is spent in the laboratory of a
classroom attempting to extract the mythological "author's intent" from a
novel, trying to read each word with intense care in order to vindicate
the severity and oddity of the work:
Did these authors themselves even truly understand?
