Why I Write…And When I Don’t…

I think the hardest thing about writing is staying with it. Yep, staying with it.

The words, the phrases, the sentences, the paragraphs. It’s all in there–the writing.

But to write you have to stay with it from the single letter to the period at the end of the sentence that concludes the last paragraph that finishes the book.

And then we begin again.

…

The repetitiveness is daunting, very.

And why do we stay with it, we writers, we gods of change, mere humans seeking to make the world right, set it in our own image?

How narcissistic?

Perhaps we keep writing starting the story with the first letter of the first word of the first sentence that opens the paragraph to set ourselves straight.

Or perhaps it is to keep ourselves going. Driving towards the end of a story we seek not so much to comfort ourselves as to truly find out what is going to happen at the end.

Will our major character to whom we have given over our story in part because she or he has ripped it from our trembling hands, make it. Will she or he be all right.

To save themselves is to save us, their writer, the author of their lives and the events that encompass their lives.

I am unsettled, a little short or insane, crazy perhaps, when I do not write.

I don’t mean for weeks or months. Days.

I am addicted to words. Unless they ooze from my fingers that either type upon the keyboard, or hold the pen or pencil that scribbles the words, I am lost, without myself, that other part of me that slithers out in my antagonists or marches forth in the soul of my protagonists and suffer like I when I am not writing.

Whatever the case I must write, not because I am great or even good at what I do.

I write because it feeds my soul.

And because my soul aches a little less when I am writing.

Why do you write?

How does it feel when you are writing?

What is it like when you are not writing?

~ by Anjuelle Floyd on December 27, 2009.