Prose / Writing
On Writing.
Hemingway claimed there was nothing to it.
You sat down at the typewriter, because that was a thing people did back then, and bled. I think what Hemingway did not make abundantly clear is that the process is grueling and daunting and no one in their right mind would choose to do it. So they don’t.
Hemingway sat down at a typewriter and bled because he had to. He couldn’t not. And that is the plague of the writer — writing is not a want, but a need. An insatiable-pestering-lingering-crawling compulsion to transfuse the blood that runs out of the tips of our fingers into something that someone else will hopefully understand. It is like air for my chain smoker lungs, and I am perpetually drowning.
To write is like depression, therapy, rehab and relapse all at once.
It is a purging of all the things that need to leave my body and a stone table solidifying those things into forever. These typed characters are not the same as ink but they feel like it, sometimes.
When you see your own words etched into a screen something goes off in your mind — This is how it is. This is how it will always be.
This phenomenon is exactly why we writers need to be careful. Cautious. The same act of compulsion that helps us get through our days with some form of sanity is the same act that describes to us who we are. If I write I am well, then I feel well. If I write I am wrecked, then I feel wrecked.
Perhaps this speaks to the unconscionable power we think we hold. It’s a complex. Whatever I write is truth. The thing is, sometimes as you are writing you come to a completely different conclusion at the end than you meant to at the start.
It follows, then, that writers should never leave something half-finished for too long.
Perhaps I was wrecked but if I had just held on long enough — dug my nails into the keyboard for just a little bit longer and figured out what my mind and soul and heart were really trying to say — I would find that really, I was well. Perhaps that’s how life is too.
So when I say that the worst part about being a writer is the writing, it is not because I am lazy, or bored, or despise the process of piecing together coherent language — it is because blood is leaving my body. I am fatigued. Hemingway was right.
However, the best part about being a writer also happens to be the writing.
Not the text — not the finished product — but the act of writing is like nothing I’ve ever known. You know when swimmers talk about how they feel in the water? Like the world fades away and there is nothing left but themselves. That’s what writing is for me. The way swimmers feel in the water I have recreated with my mind. Fingers flying across the keyboard and head somewhere heaven could only know. It’s like I disappear, for a moment. I don’t have the thoughts I have on a normal day and my mind isn’t working in the same way. It’s natural. Like drinking water from a spring or lifting your head to the sun and you know this is what humans were meant to be doing.
I know this is what I was meant to be doing.
And somehow, in the disappearing, I am more myself than I am doing anything else. The withered version of me fades away and all that’s left is the me I’m supposed to be — the best version of me — the me that writes paragraphs of her ex-lovers and sees the sky and ocean so close in color that she says they kissed and became each other. The me that sees metaphors in clothing stores and who can’t help but rhyme in prose sometimes. I feel the best when I am writing, and I feel the second best when I have written.
So yes, the worst part about being a writer is the writing. But the best and worst things in life often come hand in hand, anyways.
