Writing can be fun, exciting and joyously exhilarating. It can also be hair-pullingly frustrating, tedious and exhausting. Writing is lonely – sitting lost in your own thoughts, writing for hours on end but unable to share until your story is ready. But as I sit here at midnight rewriting a story I have been laboring over for a month now, I take pleasure in imagining great authors of the past doing the same exact thing (minus getting distracted by Facebook) – looking at a story, knowing it’s not working, trying it a different way and saying with great excitement “Aha! This is it! THIS is the story I wanted to tell not that pile of crap I produced before!”
There is a scene in the movie “The Hurricane” in which Denzel Washington’s character, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, says of writing:
“Writing is- It's magic… When I started writing, I discovered that I was doing more than just telling a story…. Every time I sat down to write, I could rise above the walls of this prison… I could look out over the walls all across the state of New Jersey, and I could see Nelson Mandela in his cell writing his book. I could see Huey. I could see Dostoyevsky. I could see Victor Hugo, Emile Zola. And they would say to me, 'Rube, what you doin' in there?' And I say, 'Hey, I know all you guys.' It's magic…”
My laundry is piling up, my toilets are getting funky, my floor is sticky, but I am busy creating magic over here. I am busy communing with writers around the world and throughout time.
Oh, and I dyed my hair:
LOVE the hair!! :)
ReplyDelete