The Writer’s World

We would do this all day long without expecting a penny in return. Won’t we? Isn’t that the tragedy of being a writer, that the love for writing runs deep in our veins? That writing is synonymous to breathing; essential for our existence – it keeps us alive? Why is it that we love to do this? Is it the escape from reality, and the therapeutic release of emotions on paper? Is it the ability to build lives of alternative truths and infinite possibilities from just thoughts and words?

We are the creators, the big idea people, the dreamers and daydreamers, and the visionaries who see the world with too many different lenses. We tell the story that’s hidden in others’ hearts, we give them a voice and awaken their wildest imaginations. We are writers.

We see people for more than they know they are. We absorb them, their smiles and frowns, their rage and joy, their ugly and their beautiful, their good and bad, without judgement, and give them eternal life through our words. Places and objects too, can live forever with significance if we so choose.

Sometimes we resolve feuds and bring joy to the reader with “happily ever afters.” Occasionally we get our revenge. We tell the other side, and we also instigate the emotions, revealing secrets, unearthing pasts, and exposing the unthinkable. We pull out of you what you may otherwise never express. Writers, we are.

The horror is this. Most people around us are not that interesting. They don’t contain anything worth writing about. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone is so unique in their individualities. Most people around us are merely average Janes and Joes, who exist to fill the extra space. They’re the fillers, with their routine lives, mundane activities, and surrounded by the all too familiar changeless crowds.

There are those whose Wikipedia knowledge of every irrelevant thing is nothing short of a nuisance to listen to, like a resounding fire alarm. Then there are the whisperers who envy everything and everyone in life. There are also those who love to hear their own voices, and whose lives are limited to watching those they speak about. These are fillers. They bore us beyond belief; the normal people who bring nothing but normalcy, and grossly mundane like lukewarm water or mild and cloudy weather.

Then, once in a while, as rare as celestial occurrences someone sneaks out of the crowds of fillers, and shakes us to the core. The exceptions to the rule, the aloof, the rebellious, the broken and the breakers, the warriors and the peace makers, the contrasting good and bad, the trustworthy and even the dangerously evil. Those whose presence chills us to the bones and burns our surface as a whipping blizzard, and those who warm our hearts like an island sunset. Those with pretty eyes that peel your covers, and smirks that cause reverential confusion. The infectious and the influential, the extravagant and the simply kind, we fall hard for these and follow their every move. We watch, observe, and absorb, knowing that one day their very beings will collide with our words and create the escape this melancholic world full of fillers desperately need.

We chase the exception like a banker chases paper, with urgency and desperation. We want to know them, every single one, and so we search the world through. In our search, we even find an infinity or two in the places we pass, and there we sow some eternal seeds, with words that will bring forth lifetimes in stories.

On writing – ©R. A. Douglas 2019