“Writing is refined thinking.” - Stephen King
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Writers tend to live their lives twice because, in their profession, they have to touch everything in life more than once. They have to feel everything twice; they have to hold all their memories on stand-by because you never know which heartbreak or loss could become raw material for a character’s emotional arc or the right description for a specific death scene. I feel like writers write not in ink, but in blood and tears because it is only in pain and agony that the best stories are written; when unforgettable words echo off the page like a sad song. Writers have the comfort of being stuck in the past without letting it destroy them; they are the only time travelers in human history, who have the power to write themselves into another time and not lose themselves in the process, because in such a journey, it is where they most likely find who they truly are, and who they’re not.
However, there are perks and curses to such a gift; with such a power to move worlds and minds with the stroke a pen, there are hardships that come with the venture. When giving yourself away to the ink and paper, a part of you falls away with the words, and you can’t catch yourself before the drop.
That’s the most painful part about writing, you have to trust the person you hate the most:
Yourself.
Writing is a kind of falling that doesn’t end, once you jump off the edge and onto the whiteness of the laptop screen, you disappear into the air and you keep falling until time is nothing but a mere illusion. You fall to the depth of who you are, and no matter how hard you try to fight it, you already started what always had to end: the first chapter of acceptance.
Writing can be a sense of therapy for us writers, but sometimes after the cliche break-ups, the cheats, and the playboys, but sometimes it’s a curse.
There would be times that I would hate letting my heart spill out; letting these feelings, the truth escape, because it makes it more real than I want it to be; it makes the reality I see as my illusionistic nightmare corporal, like giving breath to all my ghosts. I don’t want to let all my sorrows take over me, I refuse to give them, to give him such power over my thoughts, over the imagination I used to see as a weapon in my world-making hands, now I see it as a curse rather than a gift, because that’s the beauty and tragedy of being a writer, not a single memory or experience ever goes to waste.
However, there are perks to such a gift, even if most can’t see it.
When you’re a writer, you feel more than what everyone else feels, Some would feel a drizzle, we would catch the storm.
Some would see a river, we would see oceans.
It can be a curse, to feel so much, but to bleed it in ink, is the most . Ernest Hemmingway wasn’t wrong about writing, it isn’t writing at all, it is bleeding. Your sadness is spilled all over the notebooks, the word documents, the scraps of paper, wrappers, inside covers of your favorite books, in the margins of your math textbook, it breathes out of you, your life becomes the story, just another chapter, another paragraph, another sentence
It’s a superpower all on its own, to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and not only that, but to create another human being all together, a whole world.
You can create religions.
You can create Gods.
You are a god of your own tiny world behind the laptop screen, or looking down at a moleskin notebook, and it’s a beautiful thing when you can create something out of nothing, out of thin air or from a single string of thoughts.
I could come up with the beginning and end of a story just by the first verse of a Breaking Benjamin’s song.
I could create a character just by looking through the window of my friend’s car, my mind wandering as my eyes trace the blurs of city lights, slipping into another person’s thoughts and in the silence, I hear my main heroine’s voice instead of my own/and then my thoughts no longer become my own, but become someone else’s and a new heroine or hero is born.
It happens in a second, you don’t know where the muse comes from, but the story comes when it comes and goes when it goes, we just have to listen to it when it decides to show.
It’s like speaking parasol tongue, only a few can speak the language of writers, and understand the beauty of it, the true thrill of it unless you are one yourself, you won’t understand it until you feel it, what it’s like when words just ache at the tips of your fingers to be written, to be heard, when your characters keep talking, keep the story going even when your notebook is closed, and the pen is capped up. Being a writer becomes everything you do becomes part of everything that you do and everything that you are.
