Sounds easy, right?
The concept of the writing process didn't truly hit me until I began teaching it. Writing is so much more than slapping words on a page: it is the means of communication through the ages. Artists such as Shakespeare and Milton, Benjamin Franklin and Emerson, still speak to us because of this incredible gift. Words have power; thus the written word can move mountains.
The image of the 18th and 19th century Romantics - scribbling words on a page, filled with inspiration from Nature and God, publishing their fresh and perfect verse to energize and affect readers - amuses me, simply because despite their claims that true writing comes from the spirit, they labored for days, weeks, sometimes months to make a piece of prose sing.
And yet, I agree with them. Ultimately, writing starts with the soul. Why do I write? What moves me? Do I have something to say? Should I create a made-up world because I think it could enhance the real one? Why wouldn't I? is the better question.
However, let's be realistic here: writing is much more than spirit. There is a deeper side to writing which most readers don't see. Not until I began writing original fiction did I understand that writing is messy, scary, and at times traumatic. Bringing a new world to life - infusing it with believable characters and plot, a love story and conflict - is the most frightening, vulnerable thing I have ever done. Ask some of my friends and they'll tell you that I hide from my characters much of the time, for fear that I will either screw them up beyond recognition...or make them so incredible that I find my writing Voice and move closer to the real fact of being published.
So I return to my original question: why do I write? Because I must - because I would rather die than never tell the stories that keep me up at night, push me to compose words on a computer screen or on paper; or the characters who make me laugh, cry, scream, shout, and every other emotion under the sun.
The image of the inspired writer writing her novel in a notebook has never disappeared, but now I know the truth. Behind the words is the truth about one's self: the vulnerability, the side never seen in the writing process because no one ever speaks of it.
And that's okay. It's a part each writer must discover for herself.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one's heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one's soul.
- M. K. Simmons
1 comments:
Great post! You've nailed it, really.
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