September 18, 2010

• Writing My Way Out

  When writing, it's important for me to be able to redirect my real-life experiences into not quite real analogies and stories. There has to be an ability to put up a wall, be it paper-thin, between my current pain or pleasure and the actual words that bounce from my fingers to the screen.

  However, sometimes events happen that shatter that wall. Emotions are too raw, and the memory of past events weigh too heavy on my mind. Usually a day or two is good enough to let the emotions pass their way from heart to fingers and out of the body. But once in a while, the emotional storm continues unabated, and good writing is impossible. One can't construct the proper structure for a good article when continually haunted by past events that desperately try to leak their way out and take over the story, whether they are related to the subject matter or not.

  In the end, the only way out is to write desperately and quickly until the past events get tired of chasing your words and leave you alone. They may be able to touch you at 500 words, you may hear their footsteps at 1000 words, but as the pages pile up and the sweat drips down, they fall behind. The events are not real, in the truest sense of the word. They are merely events in time, and as such are not real when viewed from outside time, where one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day. If you stop writing, they will find you, and they will do their best to finish you off. If you start writing, they will clamor to be heard. If you do not stop writing, they will fade away, overwritten until their tiny bytes are replaced by something bigger and better.

  • 9:40 pm
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