If you don’t love to write, give it up. It’s much too hard, much too taxing, the rewards much too elusive and fleeting.
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer recently marked his 25th anniversary as a writer with a column of apologetic self-reflection (see 25 years). He notes that producing a column three times a week “is like being married to a nymphomaniac – as soon as you’re done, you’ve got to do it again.”
Love has to be your mistress (mister?), with all the intrigue of excitement, guilt, ennui, power and hopelessness inherent in such furtive pursuits. Writing is at once a secret pleasure and a secret sin – the kiss of an arrogant mistress threatening more to consume than to consummate.
But if you can embrace the mistress in spite of that, writing is easy. You may not write inspiringly, or even competently … but it is akin to el acto sexual: It cannot be done badly.
The cathartic scrape of pen on paper alone is a productive act of holy – nay, unholy – personality. The act distinguishes our uniqueness, for no one can ever again communicate any precise thought in the same way, with the same history of personality, occupying the same point in space and time.
Like a loving mate, writing completes us and, in making us whole, simultaneously shreds the fabric of the constituent components. Blood, coursing through arterial and venous highways, fills the heart, engorges the organ, and fills us with the breath of life; spilled into the gutter, it is the extinguishment of our being through the dark power of evil and death.
The Writer bleeds on the page, whether in blistered anguish or with wrenching glee – whether with words meticulously crafted or divorced from the subjugation to self-discipline – or whether lighting upon any click of the cosmic compass orbiting between the extremes of infinite straight-line continua.
Truly I tell you, the creation of a written masterpiece is like God’s creation of time. A succession of events move point-to-point in a straight line, yet always circling around to a point of origin as singular and infinite as an atom spiraling into the black hole of universal birth.
And each unique succession of events moves along a parallel orbit to another, and another, and another – smothering us in the entanglements of life.
In a world filled with creation, the expression of our own unique circumstance and perspective contributes, however ponderously, to the whole. The innocuous, the trivial, the venal, the blasphemous all – all – contribute to the continuum in the same manner and breadth as the pompous, the significant, the inspirational and the pure.
As a moth is drawn to the light, we are inevitably drawn to the latter circumstances: We scorn the innocuous to embrace the pompous and the significant; renounce the vulgar in order to court the inspiring purity of holy verse. And yet, the enigmatic juxtaposition of good and evil fuels our very being. Absent the contradiction of black hole and the nova, the universe is less than complete.
Love your writing … love all writing. Learn what you can, while you can, from the good, the bad and the ugly old hag staring back from the page with lust in her eyes. And yes, strive to be better … but embrace every act of creation.
Next: You will be visited by Three Ghosts
[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]
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