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🏷️ Categories: Writing, Creativity.
“Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it seems to disturb no one else.” — Kathryn Stockett, The Help
A few days ago I was talking with some friends about keeping journals…
At some point in the conversation, one of them said something that stuck in my memory: “So everything we’re talking about today is going to end up in your journal, right?” I told her yes. In part, always yes. Every person, place, and moment that has meant something to me ends up recorded on some page.
Nothing escapes the day’s final tally.
That’s the wellspring of writing. A writer doesn’t invent from nothing. Nobody really does. A writer simply pays attention where no one else bothers to look, then stubbornly refuses, with a sickly persistence, to let it fall into oblivion.
That’s the crux of the matter.
You already know this, you live it every day. We’re flooded with information that comes and goes without leaving a trace. A face, a stray phrase, an ordinary afternoon: the average mind processes and discards them instantly because we’re saturated with fast, intense stimuli, and we no longer give weight to the everyday and the slow. Most brains let these things drop into the black hole of forgetting, though a writer has a different system running behind the curtain.
Their attention is a filter on reality, and the hunger to write forgives nothing.
Once something manages to get through that filter, there’s no turning back. Your smile becomes a sentence that repeats in their head for days. A glance held one second too long risks becoming a metaphor. Without asking for it, by getting close to a writer you’ve already become raw material for a mind that distorts reality only to hand it back to you transformed into words.
That’s the reality behind the obsession of writing.
Writers have a habit of intensifying everything they receive.
Give them love, and they return it multiplied into paragraphs, letters, mountains of poems. Give them indifference, and they hand it back in rough prose that underlines every moment you seemed distant — maybe turning you, without your knowing, into the most bitter character in their next novel. There’s no way around it. To love a writer, to hate them, even just to know them, is to risk your story with that person ending up as ink one day.
If you’re not ready for them to read your chapters, better not get close.
It’s a quiet discipline. Writing is solitary, and paying attention requires silence. The way your eyes moved across the landscape. The exact sound of your laugh. The gesture of looking away when something bothered you and you didn’t want to say it out loud… A writer keeps their eyes on those details.
And the key, as you can see, is always in the ordinary.
That’s where extraordinary paragraphs are born.
That transformation is the writer’s craft.
Kafka didn’t write about a man turning into an insect by chance. It was a metaphor for no longer being understood by the very people who should know you best. Something similar happened to Sylvia Plath, who turned her grief into a language so intimate that, decades later, strangers still see themselves in her words. Or to Osamu Dazai, who turned his sense of not fitting into the world into a reflection where thousands still recognize themselves.
Writers don’t need much drama.
The ordinary is more than enough.
The strangest part of all this is that, even though they record everything, they also wish they could forget. There are names they’d like to erase and memories they’d love to leave behind for good, but those memories don’t disappear as easily as they’d like — because they end up being the well writers return to again and again when inspiration runs dry.
If you think about it that way, writing is cruel.
Long after the conversations have ended and the photographs have faded with time, a version of you will go on living among their sentences, intact, waiting for someone to read it again. Someone who, without knowing how the idea was born, will feel recognized in their own world — the same way it happens to us when we read Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Osamu Dazai, and so many others who turned their experience into ink. There we recognize our own fear, doubt, joy, all reflected in those lines. Behind those rows of black ink that sometimes look like the bars of a cell, there are trapped stories of real people, moments only the writer knows in their true form.
Words stay alive long after everything else fades.
That’s the risk you take by getting close to a writer.
— Álvaro
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I learned about journaling from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. At 6 AM I write 1-3 pages max free form. It is the best part of my day.
This is brilliant. You've hit everything about being a writer here. What's more, people often dismiss the writer as this quiet shadow in the corner. In reality, as you pointed out, they are absorbing everything going on in the room. I too have follen into that trap of writing a person's comment or experience into a story and incuring their indignation. We writers must be careful of other people's stories. They don't belong to us, but if we morph them skillfuly, the reader may never see that that particular character or poem is about them.
As a writer in a romantic partnership, have you ever received the complaint that you are the one who's distant and living in an alternate universe? When I was writing my first novel, I was living in it and my husband got pretty miffed about it.