Live To Write Or Write To Live?
Is Writing A Means Or An End?
Whether we are writing professionally or not, there is one question that always baffles those who love writing: Do we treat writing as a means to an end (Meaningful Life) or do we treat life itself as a means to an end (Writing)? In other words, do we use writing to create a life filled with purpose and happiness? Or do we use all of your life experiences to serve our writing? Perhaps, the best writers are those who do a bit of both.
Being a creative profession, writing requires us to go deep within and get inspired from our personal lives. And when we love writing too much, it is natural for us to start using our life experiences as the material for our craft. A lot of times, this approach helps us survive — we might be stuck at a toxic workplace but the very thought of using this bad phase in our writing helps us cope the worst that the workplace might have to offer.
Looking at all of life experiences as a means to an end can help us get through life with a reasonable amount of hope and purpose.
However, the problem with the above approach is this — we cannot make a powerful impact as writers if all we do is cleverly use our life experiences for writing. The blood boiling in our veins might not flow through our ink if our motive is to game life for the sake of becoming a great writer. When it comes to emotions, we cannot trick them because being manipulative defeats the whole purpose of writing. Let’s say we are finding the sunset beautiful — it is okay and natural for us, writers, to think about how we can express our awe in words. However, we need to first genuinely appreciate the sunset. Merely using the sunset to score brownie points as a writer might not work and even if does, it might not move our readers. At the same time, the desire to express our awe is also important — it is okay to feel the need to express everything we feel through writing but we need to be careful to fall into the trap of manipulation.
It is important to remember that while all life experiences can be the material for our writing, we need to honor them and not merely ‘use’ them to write. In other words — writers cannot avoid feeling painful things just because those painful things can be the material for their next book.
Knowing that we can turn our pain into a meaningful piece of writing doesn’t make us immune from the pain.
So, writers should absolutely obsess about writing and thinking about how they can channel various emotions through writing. But great writers don’t outsmart their emotions. They befriend them.
