When Writing is Charmingly Evil
A writer wrote me asking a simple question. I answered that my life was pure fabrication. That my real grandfather was not a man anything like the one I wrote about. I explained my only memory of grandfather was of a man who spoke about beer and bread and hard times.
Writing, for me, is an inexpressibly interesting experience. I suppose, in the end, I’m happy to fool people. I write because I’ve failed at everything. I didn’t want to and didn’t set out to, I just did. Writing leaves me in a state of grace, takes me out of the common gutter and projects me in a way that life itself has failed to do.
Pride is a strange thing to write about. It is a thing too large to put into words, like courage, like talent, but to tell a story, to read a story, to convey something of yourself while hiding beneath a cloak is almost evil…because it is so charming. The quality of a writer’s heart, the tenacity with which he pursues a story, the life of his characters, is no more than his own impudence at work.
Pride in the well told lie. Can there be such a thing? When I write about the bald-faced cheek of a young man I’m not writing about an assertion of superiority, but a bold attempt to balance inferiority.
Writing is not too different from suffering a chronic illness or having worms. You can never seem to get rid of them entirely. If a person has this underlying need, compulsion, yearning, fixation, demand, hankering, desire, frothing-in-at-the-mouth obsession to write, then it will always be nagging away to express itself. It might not manifest itself continuously (unless, of course, you feed it at regular intervals), but it will always pop up and demand to be addressed.
The fact is I’m always being educated. It isn’t easy for me because I’m stubborn and get ruffled easily. I believe I can write! I actually believe, or have believed, that I can write a story. I’ve now been educated. I cannot. If I were to spend several weeks with an accomplished writer, a month with an editor, perhaps speak with an agent, I would soon come to appreciate just how far away I am from reaching my goal. BUT if any bad writer can come up with the draft of a good story then that bad writer has every chance of being published.
This is my best chance, slim as that is. So I continue to attempt to find the elusive theme, because the more I write the more I’ll improve. I think it goes hand in hand. It’s impossible not to. I will certainly be a far better writer.
Tell me I’m wrong but everything, of course, depends on what has been done with the time that has already passed. If the mind is well stored, and friendships have been kept decent, and the insatiable spirit of curiosity and wonder are still living, then the last days may be the best days.
Life, has it not, invited dangerous friendships, acquisitiveness, worldly ambition, in fact all in all, a spirit of restlessness. The writer is born and reborn every time he or she taps fingers on the keyboard or takes the pen between his fingers. The only certainty about writing is the constant uncertainty.
Medium offers me a purpose, enabling me to read other writers, to lie a little, to share something of the passion I feel about the art of communication.
I’m prompted to answer what is real? What is false? Is it the job of a writer to answer such queries? Does his work not stand for what he is?
I’m a writer; I tell lies. I believe we enjoy writing for a vast array of reasons. No matter what we write or how we write we all have one thing in common, a love of words, a need to capture something, even for a moment.
Naturally, none of the above may be true.
