Pages

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

This is why I do this, every single day.

An excerpt from:
Why You Need To Write

Even when you believe that you have no story to tell, peel apart the fleshy pink undersides of your brain and untangle the red-and-blue vines that wrap around your heart until you find the words you thought had escaped you.

Purchase notebooks, pens, and pencils. But don’t purchase erasers. Erasing your thoughts forces them into oblivion. It reduces them into only bits of rubber on a wide, naked expanse that you could have used to flesh them out into breathing, crying, laughing characters and stomach-tossing, chest-pounding stories.

Don’t you see how using erasers is tragic?

Instead, leave your imperfect thoughts on the page. Scratch through them — carefully, so that you don’t obscure them. Cultivate these infertile words. Use them. Fallow them. Watch different — greener, stronger — thoughts sprout from what you would have laid to waste.

Let writers who came before you hand you the bricks and mortar you will need to construct your own style.

Realize that they — like me, like you, like anyone has ever stared hopelessly at a blank sheet of paper — have experienced moments of silence. They have doubted their skill, questioned their passion, and wondered if this was really what they knew how to do.

Understand what they understood: writing, like any art, requires the willingness to split yourself open and shake the stories from your bones, snatch the words that rest in your marrow.

So, write. Fill empty spaces with pregnant phrases, clauses, fragments — thoughts half-formed or fully developed — until your wrist aches and your eyes blur.

Try. Try over and over and over again. Fail. Succeed. Write garbage. Write gold.

But, just write.


No comments:

Post a Comment