Over the course of the past few years I’ve come to this blog each day hoping to discover my writing voice, or to unload the burden of ideas and words, or to rant, or to reflect on the world I–we–live in. I am, at heart, a person who is in search of something. I thought it was fame. I thought it was fortune. Family found me, but it wasn’t that thing I sought. I think I’ve been looking for the way back into the stream.
Yesterday I talked about the Speed Force, a flag football team I assembled with hopes of taking a small city championship. The name points to a well of energy that is like the Star Wars ‘force’ that one can tap into to move at incredible speed. I feel the well is that for writers. We can tap into the zeitgeist and draw from it lore that compels readers to feel something. I want my readers to feel something–all writers want that. When I think about the concept of fame/fortune/etc. it is really just the side effect of understanding that the readers have felt something in your words that connects with them. It is a form of proof of your writing mattering outside of yourself.
I feel like I’ve lost that thread a bit in myself–the words fail to matter as much to me as their writer, so why should they matter to someone who is not me. There are paths around this problem/cures to what ails the wounded writer, but I don’t know them all. Payment is one. More than a side effect, being paid for your words is proof of talent–or at least proof that your message was received somewhere. Casting your words into the darkness with no proof there is anything out there is terrible business. Yet that is what every writer feels at the beginning, and what most writers feel for years.
In the end, writing is as blood moving through my veins. I could never rid myself of it and survive.