What all writers face
Every couple of months I get together in Portland with other writers in Maine at an event put on by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. We assemble at a cozy brewpub (that happens to be co-owned by another writer) and just try to connect.
These people are, in many ways, as unlike me as any group of writers could be. They write poetry. They write essays. The write memoirs and narratives and the occasional self-help book. They don’t write business books, and when I tell them that is what I do, I typically get a quizzical look. That must seem excessively commercial to them. They do tend to relate when I tell them I write a blog post every weekday.
What we share
We all face the blank page.
We all face self-doubt and a need to get motivated.
We all face nausea when we see the flaws in what we have created.
We all despair on dealing with editors and publishers and beta readers.
We all are frustrated with the state of publishing.
And we’re all worried, to one extent or another, about AI.
These people are all ages, all genders, all races, from all walks of life. But when I look in their eyes I see something I recognize, and I hope they feel the same about me.
Sewing words together is a joyful, fraught, insane, bizarre, and wonderful thing to do. Whether those words will be seen by millions or just by yourself, it is an act of defiance against the chaos and entropy of the universe.
We create. Before we create, there is nothing. After we create, there is something intensely personal that did not exist before, a collection of words that has the potential to communicate knowledge, meaning, and emotion to a reader.
So yes, I relate to these people — even the poets.
And I’m going to help them any way I can, because they are already helping me.
“Sewing words together is a joyful, fraught, insane, bizarre, and wonderful thing to do. Whether those words will be seen by millions or just by yourself, it is an act of defiance against the chaos and entropy of the universe.”
Amen! This reminds me of a statement by Leonard Shlain in his 1999 book, “The Alphabet versus The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image,” in which he writes:
“The written word is essentially immortal. To a hyper-conscious primate who had become aware that death was inevitable, the discovery of a method to project one’s self beyond a single life span seemed nothing less than miraculous.”
I find Shlain most intriguing. He was a surgeon, with a fascination for how the mind and the brain work, physically and culturally. He wrote four books, of which I have read only two (this one cited and “Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light,” which often left me in the weeds, from which he would gently extract me and set me back on the path). I keep my eye out for the other two …