For me, the act of writing is like drinking from a tinted blue glass filled with clear, cold water, the sides of the glass condensation-streaked with ice shards clinking against the heat of a summer day.
The experience is waxing organic, like a growth in the soul. Phrases appear as exotic plant sprouts, joining together in a garden of mind-babble and intentional awareness where each thought is a separate and beautiful organism. I channel the souls of my mind-creatures, acting as a conduit for that expression. My life writes itself into the creation. Characters take shape in reality, visit during dreams, and move with me either like ghosts or like firestorms. I form passages from fragments, moments of inspiration captured as still photographs, and they join together in an inexorable and necessary flow.
Likewise, I listen to the words others say and capture meanings, mind-pictures, emotions. Then I put them down in my notebook. I drive through the fog and everything is alien and new, and I pull over to the side of the road to write, “Fog, the rivers’ middle, fog” which makes no sense now, but that moment grew into a poem years later as I nurtured it.
When I write, I translate scribbles into coherent thought, I rewrite my reality into something sensible, and I put the universe to rights using the all-powerful word. Sometimes, I sit typing blind, facing the screen late at night, juiced on coffee and longing for another cigarette, and I generate pages of text from one single sentence written in my notebook.
Writing is an act of creation, and to create, I have to be with and in the written word, to be with myself, to be with the rest of the human race. This can be difficult, but once started, it flows like spring water.
Writing is an art. Like any art, I cannot be outside it and still participate in it. When making art, when crafting a piece, at the essence, the author must simply sit down and do it. Action is essential to art. During off-times in my life, I never wrote. For years, I survived without my artist-nature being fulfilled, but I was an amputated human being. My life without art is useless, worthless, and completely unfulfilled. Thus I dedicate myself to the action of creation, weaving words into tapestries to delight, amuse, and provoke action in others and in myself. I wonder, Why do we not teach more art in schools?
Writers, poets, artists of the world, let our pens be ever busy. Let our thoughts always be free. Let us work together to rewrite reality into something fit for human life instead of writing a world built on the idea of survival. For we, poets, authors, news reporters, bloggers, all who work with words, we
measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and [we] are . . . perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)Writing is a sharing of oneself and a communication of our same humanness from one to another. We can use it to create. I urge all who feel the call to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboards, words to recording—give yourself time to create. Such exercise is well worth it. And create with intention, for your words have impact on others.
Yes. Writing fills the author with something larger than ocean, earth, or sky, like blue electric waves flattening ego. Blue lightning expressed can light fires of inspiration in others’ minds. Let my words cause transformational flame.
