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Price Check

It's strange, this writer's mantle I've been consciously bearing lately. I fear that if I am not constantly unraveling it into print, then it will consume me by its sheer weight of thoughts and descriptions and questions. I feel I must constantly be feeding a loom of writing with the disheveled threads of my thoughts, trying to turn it into a beautiful piece of fabric, presentable and sensible to the world. I fear that I cannot keep up with this newfound deluge of materials, now that I'm actually sitting at the loom.

Also, I promised myself that I wouldn't write entries like these, mere diary entries of my days and emotions. For the training I want, that simply will not do. But it has to be said at least once what the strange pitfalls of an inarguable need to write are.

When you read a book, a good book, do you even know what that author went through to get those words on that page in front of you? Perhaps weeks in a cabin, isolated with his pages, doing solitary battle with the plot. Lonely hours tucked behind library shelves and buried beneath books to cross-check pertinent information. Or the time spent staring at a flat screen and willing the information to come from the internet or the words to come out of your fingers or the paragraph to end. And that's only the beginning. You pour your mind and heart and sweat into this intangible living thing, and then bring it out for dissection: personal editing, others editing, sometimes you cut off whole limbs, and sometimes they slaughter your beloved creation and tell you to go back to page one. No wonder authors have gone mad from such a necessarily lonely and harsh way of living.

I agree with Annie Dillard. In the way that a good magician never reveals his secrets, a good writer should never punish the reader with the suffering they went through in the process of writing.

"Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: 'You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?' The young photographer said, 'Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.' ... How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?" 
--Annie Dillard The Writing Life

Yet in this medium, as friends and family who read here, I can be less vigilant with this aspect, yet it is a discipline I must cultivate. Yet you must know that I write because the writing won't allow me to not write. That if I didn't write the mantle would weigh my footsteps so heavily that my life would end up stopping that I might save myself by writing away the burden. Yes, there is joy and purpose to be sure in the process, but the fact that I'm a writer makes it my job, my duty to write. A mother loves  and gets joy from her children, but being a mom is still a job.

It's such a strange thing, with ears attuned at odd angles. Simple small events will snag my thoughts, or a past happening months or even years ago will call out. And there are times when I have to drop whatever I'm doing to put that luminous new thread on the loom; for integrity of self and, hopefully, for the sake of giving to those who read.

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