“I write.” – A Love Affair With Words
I’ve said it before, and it’s my professional motto: “I Write. It’s What I Do.”
I literally can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. As soon as I could hold a pencil, I had stories to share, things to say, things that needed to be said.
I have poems and stories and random snippets of things from kindergarten, elementary/primary school, high/secondary school, both universities, all years of employment — some creative fiction, some poetry/prose, some personal brain-dump diaries.
Some of it has been or will be published in some form — whether it’s a book on Amazon like my Hart & Cole series, poetry or short stories on my The Writink website, or even just a simple Facebook post — but most of it is scattered in copybooks stashed somewhere in my cupboard, or in draft emails/posts dangling out in cyberspace.
Or, most importantly: knocking about in that cranial space between my ears where magic sometimes happens.
Even if I don’t share it all (I think I’d exhaust the universe with the sheer force of all the words), I have been writing… forever.
A Writer vs. Someone Who Writes
So yes, I write. It’s what I do.
But don’t misinterpret the motto. Writing’s not just “a thing” I do. Writing is an identity. A writer is just as distinct as a sexuality, a gender, a religion, a nationality.
It’s a state of being.
I quite like Eliot Rose’s piece on “The Difference Between a Writer and Someone Who Writes”, in particular:
A writer’s mind is sticky, cavernous. It is a locus of constant invention and generation, but also of deconstruction and warfare.
And:
A writer understands the capacity for words to embolden, to eviscerate, to cut a man in half. A writer’s words have texture and an aesthetic – they mean one thing on paper and another in your mouth.
For me, it’s a little something like that. I think writers see the world differently. I think writers see words differently. For a writer, a word is a living, breathing organism.
Words: A Love Affair
Do you know what’s beautiful about words?
Unlike math or science, no formula will produce the exact same result twice.
The synapses, the cognitions, the connections, may ricochet and interact…
But imitation is its own flattery that cannibalises itself.
Genre notwithstanding, no two writers can independently produce the same piece.
In fact, no one writer can produce the same piece with significant lapse of time and memory.
No — each piece owns its own emotion, its own moment in time. The nuances, the perspectives. Each is a kernel in and of itself, a singular atom in spite of itself, a gem both in and out of its context.
The beauty of language, of words tumbling over each other to find their right places, of craft being created, to be witnessed by the eyes of others.
The simplicity of unpredictability is beautiful.
…Even though it’s scary, sometimes…
To put pen to paper and discover what pours forth from the intricacies of the festering mind…
…Or, as Eliot Rose says:
She will give you her soul always. And she will give it to you in writing.
