On Writing

I read somewhere recently that a writer can’t ever be just a writer, and I think I agree.  A writer has to be, not just a writer, but in part a poet, a reader, a movie goer, a lover, a scientist, an engineer.  A writer has to be a girl that has died and gone to heaven, a boy suffering from depression, the group of kids on the playground, and the gathering of old men at a hotel.  He has to be the girl sifting through novels in the bookstore and the man cradling a broken heart; the father that has lost his family and the mother who could never start one.  He has to be the scientist that has discovered something fantastic and the writer who is writing in every spare minute on napkins gathered at a coffeehouse.  He has to be the old lady telling her grandson about the stories of her youth and the pianist who has forgotten the sheet music to his piece.  He has to be the assassin hidden behind windows and curled in dark corners and the first man to ever travel beyond the solar system. 

He has to be incredibly intelligent and gloriously naïve.  Spectacularly clever and remarkably ordinary.  He has to be brave, cowardly, ecstatic, miserable, excited, and bored.  He has to fall in love—not just with people, but with places, things, activities, ideas—and he has to fall out of love.  The writer has to be a million things—taking scraps of everything he is and everything he can possibly imagine, and try to construct a story and characters that can somehow stand on its own.  From his mind, a writer can build worlds upon worlds and fill it with creatures of the most complex variety or those that are most simple.  He can craft themes that beg people to think about the way things appear to be and he can write lines that stick with the reader for ages to come. 

It’s not to say that someone has to be all of these things, or even some of these things, to write.  One can write by simply coming to the page and bleeding, as Ernest Hemingway puts it—filling the page with every emotion felt that day or any other day.  Writing of everything that’s ever hurt or healed, anything that’s left a dent or scarred.  Or writing could be months of plotting and tying up loose ends, placing the story under a microscope like a scientist and examining it until everything falls into place. 

The most interesting thing about writing is how different it can be for each person—and how many different worlds the millions of different writers can live in.  The millions of different people they can create and the millions of different conversations they can be having in their heads.