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Young Writers Society


A Lovely Time That's Slipping Fast



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Gender: Female
Points: 15580
Reviews: 324
Mon Jul 23, 2012 4:38 am
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Threnody says...



I love writing and it's meant a lot to me over the years. It's the one way that I can process the world around me, think through decisions, speculate on mistakes or successes, and even stumble upon new ways of thinking and living. When I write short stories, I think about people, emotions, interactions, and the limits of longing and ambition. My stories do not touch a particular genre as I never try to categorize such unruly and devious ideas. I'm fascinated with surrealism, but I've found that by trying to write in that style, I've discovered more about what's real as opposed to what seems too bizarre to exist in our world.

Writing has helped me through many hard times as well. When I was kneeling over a sink turning my stomach inside out on a daily basis to achieve that twisted feeling of power and control, I imagined what my ever classy and opinionated characters would have to say to a person like me. Would they dismiss my actions as mindless self indulgence or simply a means to an end? They cover such a broad range of perceptions that simply imagining their conversations helped me find order in such chaos. When I was fainting from fatigue after forgetting to eat and staying up until 3 AM and waking up at 5 AM to balance school, work and music, I wrote about people as trapped as I was. While I could never sell everything I owned and move to Newfoundland like an old man that inhabited one short story of mine, I discovered that I wasn't as stuck as I thought I was. I abandoned my views of the world being a iron cage, and saw it as being full of experiences and knowledge that I could have if I would forget my feelings of doubt and race the earth as it turned on it's axis. I was like an old man who awoke one day finding his youth restored.

But writing is not always about happiness, especially for me. One can not know sweetness without knowing bitterness. Though I was tempted to write only about beautiful things, acknowledging the overflow of sadness in the world, I found that there cannot be one without the other. Coming to terms with abandonment, loneliness and fear was the only way I could move on and find the strength to experience more of life, no matter what it tasted like. That is why my characters walk through cemeteries looking for meaning, or run away from home so they can grow up on their own terms. They reflect my need for solitude in sadness, my longing to know what happened to my parents, and my insecurity with my guardians.

Humor has also inspired me and has caused me to purposely seek out ways to acknowledge the bizarre or the nonsensical. Sometimes humor can reveal truth in its most blunt and brazen form, and this is when it's the funniest. Humor at its driest, for me, is at its most entertaining.

So I guess in the end, my writing is all about finding myself and bringing order and understanding to a world of such complexity and seriousness. I am always searching for what is real and what real is, and though I hope to come closer to truth, I am never expecting to find it. It's the thrill of chase, I suppose.

However, one thing I'm afraid of...well one thing out of many, is that I will not be able to continue writing. For those vigilant readers who have made it to the end of my long self-analysis, here is a question:

As my eyes open wider
And my hands stretch farther still-
To catch up with my mind
Should they grab all that they touch
Or just things for which there's time?
“One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes”
~ The Little Prince~
  





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Points: 300
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Thu Jul 26, 2012 6:58 am
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teddyk says...



Writing is organizing the world in the classical Enlightenment way - systematic descriptions through language; ordering, re-ordering and dissecting the internal and external, the objects and their relations.
An endless journey. It has helped me much in bringing order to my perceptions by allowing me to increasingly subdivide everything I see into smaller elements, and giving me a growing choice of ways of describing what I perceive. And words are power, words create, in the beginning was the word. Being a writer is a responsibility, to oneself as well.
  








I wish literally anything else I ever said made it into the quote generator.
— CowLogic