The magic of writing, and why I keep coming back to it. If you think writing is all I do or enjoy, not so. I enjoy different things – live instrumental concerts, history, video games (especially of the survival or city-building type), and even some super hero series on TV (well, Netflix, but you get the picture). We live in what must be the most entertainment rich age of all time, and yet I keep coming back to the hobby which is little more than just putting words onto a page, making stuff up, as people have done for literally thousands of years at this point. Why? Because I enjoy it, yes. For my overall perspective, you can read this article which will you tell some of it.
However, I will tell you another reason. Writing, for me, is not making a plan laid out in detail and the assembling every piece and part with uniform precision. I am not an architect constructing a perfect plan to be followed without question and without variance. I am a creator, an explorer of what might be for good or for ill. I know this, because I will reach points where all of the energy and drive to move forward has vanished. I sit in front of the keyboard and stare at the same dead end that has bothered me for two weeks poking out of the very morass I seem to have buried myself beneath.
What happens next is … that I am surprised. Yes! I – the author – am surprised by what happens next in the story! It’s an unexpected idea that opens up a new direction, an implausible event seen as such but then also seen as something magical and energetic and invigorating that moves the story along. It can be what it was tonight – a single, touching, beautiful moment of forgiveness and of hope. It can be that translated picture of faith in a world otherwise utterly empty, and it is the assurance of that promise ultimately fulfilling itself. It is a reason for my character and I to both stand up, turn in a new direction, and move. It is honor and joy in the imaginary world that infects its way into the real one because these are the joys many of us hold onto in both worlds. It is the promise of un-blinded optimism looking around and seeing its faith fulfilled in every way imaginable.
It is the joy I hope you share reading what I’ve written.
See you in the future,
JTL
