Writing

I love having written, but I hate writing.

Someone great said that, I'm not sure who. But I totally empathize. I love being able to sit back and look at something I have written, particularly if it seems to do what it was supposed to do. It gives me a sense of personal satisfaction like nothing else I do in life. I can't build anything like most men, that is, I have no sense of dimension and I'm not particularly good with tools. I don't cook very well, or play music or sports. Writing is, like the character from the Stephen King novella, "The Body" says, what God said to me "here's what we got for ya, kid" about. I guess I'm lucky; at least I know what I'm good at.

The only problem is that I don't do it nearly often enough. I'm naturally lazy, and unfortunately I seem to need the inspiration of others to really commit to daily writing. I wish I had the will to join on online writing group, because that might give me the daily discipline I need in order to write regularly. When I know that someone is waiting for my work to be done, I'm obviously more motivated to actually do it. When left to my own devices, I tend to be pretty lazy and always find some excuse not to actually write.

Then there's the element of perfectionism involved. Someone not long ago told me that the important thing for a writer to do is write. It seems obvious, but I think writers in general often rationalize not making their craft because they don't want to write just for the sake of writing. They want their material to be, if not perfect, at least good enough to justify the time it took in creating it. But ultimately, I know that's a cop out. If everyone only worked when they thought their work was of top notch quality, there wouldn't be a lot of work being done. Painters wouldn't paint, brick layers wouldn't lay bricks, financial consultants wouldn't, well, they wouldn't do whatever it is they do. As boring and painstaking and often arduous as it is, that daily grind of just sitting down in front of a blank screen and willing something onto it is the only way to ensure that whatever ideas you have get committed to something physical, and therein, to history.

That sounds a bit arrogant, I guess. I don't presume that most of the world gives a tinker's damn about my life and anything I think or care about. But it is important to me to translate my thoughts to paper or hard disk as the case may be, because at the end of the day it's about all I have. It's all that I can do to make any kind of impact on the world, particularly now. My mom is gone, my whole family, really and I can no longer express who I am through being a "good son" or a "family man". All that is gone. All that's left is me, and whatever unique perspective I have on my unique life, for what it's worth to anyone. Maybe someday someone will read the things I have written and find some echo of their own life and we can form a posthumous connection. Or maybe, even better, someone might read them tomorrow and gain some strength from knowing that there is someone else out there that feels the same way as he/she does. Or maybe something I write might make you see something in a different way than you did before, open up a new perspective on life that you hadn't been able to glean before.

I hope so, anyway. I hope that the stuff I write isn't just 'mental masturbation' or the pathetic musings of a lonely, desperate bachelor whose creative candle burnt out long ago. Because beyond all the deeper reasoning behind writing, I love the feeling of crafting something from nothing. I love being able to communicate my thoughts and feelings this way, and I enjoy the way writing challenges me to use my imagination to do so. It's a creative process that, like birthing, is painful and difficult but is ultimately very satisfying.

Now all I have to do is to find some way to remind myself every day how worthwhile that pain and work is and how great it feels once the work is done.