Sunday 28 August 2011

while risking being a bit too technical...

  Too many references lately on how writers write, how does the idea incubator develop into a story and so on. Risking being too technical does honestly satisfy the reader? Just wondering. I mean, the written thing is there to be read. It is already there, ready to expose you. Why bother on technicalities?
  I think I have the answer, it came to me this very morning. It's not the reader, man, it is the writer him/herself! As if writing about themselves is not enough, they always think a little extra is needed. How did you start writing and all that. And I do understand the challenge, mind you. I know how writers need the world to evolve around them, since they bother creating worlds in the first place. No no no, it's not mere vanity. It has to do with communication. You see, they think they write for themselves, but they know they write to have that conversation that was never allowed to them, some sort of ''welcome to my world'', my world, which needs at least listeners, but most preferably, needs inhabitants, to exist.
  When my writing touches you, I am happy. I am happy to have shared this vast inexplicable but nonetheless, expressed, world with you. In plain English, I feel terribly alone in here, and although it is a fun place to be, without you, I am nothing.
  Modern psychologists could call it codependence, if it weren't so self expressive and free as an act. That is, if it weren't inviting you in, on your free will, instead of making you feel sorry or guilty or whatever mechanism codependents use to drag you in to their worlds. Because you can choose not to read that book, move on into the next, in a book store.
  But, secretly, they do want you to waste time on technicalities. How did you ever decide to write? What was the first book that simply made you choose to express yourself in words? Are your created worlds real, or are they fictional? Are your heroes existing people, or are they fragments of your imagination? Or, more to the point, are they sides of you? And the list gets better and better... How do you write? In the morning? Late at night, when everything is dead and silent? Do you keep notes of dreams to use into your stories? Do you start on images you imagined, or on solid ideas? How does the story structures itself? Do you start in the beginning and finish in the end, or do you write as you feel and then unify the parts?
  They questions are endless, some very distinguished writers do actually still mention the ''how I write'' thing into their prefaces or most extraordinarily,  in separate books (!?), which forces me to ask a very stupid ''why?''. Why bother? The book is there! You do not trust your own readers to decipher it? (Same goes for critics - but that could take tons of MBs to analyse.)
  Dear writer, you do not trust your loving audience? Or is your ego so very inflated that you do not think they can understand? If they cannot understand, that means you did not explain well, spare us your 600 pages and start all over. And in the end of the day, your stories is what matters the most. Not your ''how I managed to write this masterpiece'' attitude.
  And if it is a masterpiece, it will need nothing more than its own words to persuade us, and most importantly, to speak directly into our souls!    

   

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