The Immortality of Writing
>> Friday, August 22, 2008
A thought occurred to me as I played with my four month old daughter today. Being a writer is a lot like being a child sometimes. There are days that frustrate you and nothing seems to make sense or go your way, and there are days where the sheer exploration of life, of learning and discovering as you go, is simply exhilirating. I have recently experienced both types of days in the short story I am currently writing. On the bad days, I often feel as if some piece of a puzzle is missing, and it confuses me. I keep staring at a sentence or a paragraph, trying to figure out a way to make it work, and worrying why there's just something about it that seems so out of place that I can't go on. It's almost like an instinct--I know something about it isn't working, but I have to unravel what it is.
Sometimes solving that problem is as simple as rewording the sentence, or crossing it out to write a new one. Other times, I have to delete the offending sentence or paragraph entirely before my writing brain turns on again, so to speak, and the wheels in my mind start churning the story toward my next goal.
As a writer, I know I will have many "bad" days. I have even gone through blocks of time, sometimes months, where I felt myself in stasis, unable to move with a project no matter how I tried. Sometimes even working on another project didn't help, because I was simply in a very ugly slump for varying reasons.
But on the good days, it's like the words are curling straight out of my pen's ink onto the page, or like they're printing themselves on the computer screen. Words, imagery, dialogue...they're all a jungle gym or a slide that I can build, explore, and play on. And it only takes one good day to make up for a lifetime of bad ones. That's why I keep writing; I know that eventually a good day will come again.
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2 comments:
Amen sister!
I think that reading really is a tool that should be utilized to our very best ability. I mean it does nothing but enhance our reading skills. But then again, most people think that by reading you are gaining knowledge, which they are correct! But what kind of knowledge are they gaining? Is it True? Is it False? Now a days, people conceive the notion of believing everything that is on paper or screen simply because it is "written"
If we all take a look outside the box, we can see that what we read is just a compiled amount of researched data, but then again, it does not necessarily mean it is all true most of the time. Especially if children read the mass amounts of data that is available on the internet now a days, it could be beneficial on the reading part of it, but the knowledge should be double checked on the content itself sometimes. But then again, it is a choice to believe what they read or not, and that is part of the maturing process. Whether what they read is true or not, it is still something that can be expanded into ones own pre-conceived imagination.
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