On the Act of Writing…
July 27, 2016
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Today, I do not feel like an author. Nor do I feel like a very inventive man. It’s hard for me to summon the energy to write today. I do not feel I have anything important, noteworthy, or unique to say. It’s as though I find myself adrift in an ocean of words, desperately trying to construct a boat from the flotsam and jetsam of syllables as they whirl around me in an endless susurrus of admonitions. I don’t feel particularly witty or clever. My idols, the best wordsmiths of their generations, look down on me in judgement or worse, indifference.
My dream is to become a baker who bakes his daily bread from a dough of words and insights, leavened with humor, and cooked to perfection in the oven of his mind to be offered for all the clamoring customers eager to partake of the sustenance of the soul. Yet today I feel like nothing so much as a hawking street peddler, selling the same tired wares to the same tired customers, each party more weary of the dull routine by the day, seeing no hope of it’s ending in sight.
I want to provide for my family in a fashion that will allow for them not to simply be subservient to their existence, but master thereof. I want them to captain their lives from a helm built of their own desires and a thirst to explore all that life has to offer them. I don’t want them to continually face shipwreck upon the shoals of financial disaster, or to wreck themselves by listening to the siren cry of debt.
I want them to be free of the shackles of the daily grind. To labor no more as slaves under the lash of daily necessities. I don’t want the yoke of worry which has them bound to hand to mouth living to become their only means of interacting with this joyous, painfully beautiful gift of life. They should not be prisoners in their own realities.
More than anything, I wish to be a traveler in the realm of dreams and hopes. I wish to visit the conferences where so many of like minds gather together, to cry out with one voice that what we love has worth! That we are not ashamed of the things which drive our hearts, our minds, and our aspirations, instead we embrace them for all the lovely joy that they inspire within our souls. We do not judge one another in these halls, instead we celebrate the triumphs of imagination, the passions of our ingenuity brought to the surface for all to behold with joy and wonder!
That is what I want from this fleeting and irreplaceable statistical anomaly that is our stream of consciousness! I want a life full of passion for discovery, joy of inspiration, a never-ending wellspring of ideas given life. Imagination unbound to explore the distances of universes which have yet to be given life. I want to stamp my mark upon the minds of others, that they know the rapture of the inner mind, that they know the fevered desire which guides my hands to discover tales simultaneously untold and yet achingly familiar.
When I am in the depths of despair, and feel that no light shall ever shine upon my ambitions to give them credence, I do as Hemingway instructs. I open my heart, and spill forth all the longing and hopes it contains, dripping into the cracks between my keys to guide my fingers towards their destiny. I can do no other, for I have lived a life devoid of the fire of living, and I am sick of the cold.
Now, you know my secret. When I cannot write, I simply force myself to do it anyway.
From my heart to yours,
Justin
One Comment
Michelle Wallace
Writing that speaks from am author's true voice instead of the one they wish to have is always worth reading.
I liked your last line the best.