You have to write a lot. That’s the first thing everyone says. You have to take it upon yourself to write as much as possible, dragging yourself to the well of creativity and patience each day and scooping out everything you can in order to make your soul swell with the words. For a while there I thought that drinking from the cup would empty me out. I watched King and the others fall victim to this emptiness of story, a hollow canting of something already told. I felt they’d run dry and were no longer laden with words.
I was wrong of course. Consider it a misinterpretation of the situation by someone who, until that point, had lived outside the walls of the published. It wasn’t that the old greats had fallen silent, but that the old greats had so much to do outside of produce that producing anything of significant substance was a maddening and impossible challenge. When I found myself in that same place, battling stress in the slender moments before fatigue took me utterly, I did not understand how I’d arrived or what it even meant. I wrote for months about Writer’s block, the loss of the soul-story, even this idea of giving up the written word. Heck, I quit Shadowrun altogether. None of it made me a brighter spirit or even quelled that heavy desire to put finger to key and hack out story.
It turns out that I was struggling with life outside of the words, and instead of seeing that and diving headlong into the words for a chance to reflect and perhaps even escape, I blamed the words for my stress and my rough intention. I know now that the words are what keeps me going and it is only through keeping going that one can write well.
Some Thoughts:
- I’ve had many thoughts of my grandmother lately. I don’t know what that means, except for maybe as a foreshadow to the loss of her last sister–my great aunt. In the Bayou they talk about blood as a spirit thing and you know sometimes when your blood has thinned. You can feel the soul of your lost loved one drifting away from you. I hope that isn’t the case, the way my family is so small and so nearly and terribly forgotten.