To Be A Writer.
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“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
Ernest said it best. To be a writer is to bleed. To be a writer is to purge out pages of nonsense in order to squeeze out a few drops of purified talent. We ooze, hold back for nuance, wonder, and second-guess.
We endlessly edit, cut, add, and add again, and then change it all around completely. We triumph as much as we fail. We critique as much as we are criticized.
And when the words — the succulent, painstakingly coaxed words — are birthed brilliantly, precisely, and remarkably as planned, we beam like stars, we celebrate, satisfied, even if we are all alone, which, quite frankly, is usually the case.
The writer must become, not all at once, but many times over, a thinker, a dreamer, a humorist, and a humanist. And we procrastinate like it’s our job because not getting it right is worse than writing nothing at all.
We are, in one package, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. We are opinionated, and stubborn, and silent, and wordy to a fault.
We think we know it all and become puffed up, filled to the brim with ideas… that often go nowhere. We are completely wrong on some occasions, yet on others, we somehow manage to hit the nail directly on the head.
To be a writer is to listen. It is to watch, and feel what our conceived characters are feeling, in the moment. It is to grow ever passionate, and then yield.
Yielding with worry about what is set to paper, because what is written cannot be erased, for then it forgets how to be honest, how to be real, and how to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
To be a writer is to become ever more indifferent regarding the interpretation of your words set down, the words that are more like blood spilling.
The blood is evidence of writing that will stand by itself, unattached to the writer. Writing set ablaze, unencumbered, with reckless, fearless, ceaseless abandon, is usually steeped in blood.
Tapping volumes from a speck of an idea, a writer works to expand the view of those not yet looking, to engage the senses.
We strive for you to hear the drip, smell the burning wood, taste the sour grapes, touch the soft, silky essence, see the boat sinking, and feel the havoc wreaked.
We want to set the reader upon a journey, a rich, feverish voyage that draws emotion, pulling out chortles of delight in places unexpected.
We want you to sigh in heart-heavy disbelief, especially at the end of the story when the little child dies or the mother returns, too late, much too late, or both of these things happen on the same damn page, in the same damn paragraph, leaving you distraught, welling up, swimming in a river of tears.
How could the writer not weep with sorrow, and regret, and melancholy at the very idea of such a tragic turn? How can the reader not soak the pages through?
And so to be a writer, the writer must write, and write more, again, to uncover, to expel, to release our collective hope, our fantasy, our fiction, our fears, our triumphs, and our deeply held convictions.
They are carefully, ardently dropped — those words — squarely in the center, only to splash and ripple, then widen and roll. They explode and implode, only to diminish, to diminish still, to nothing, straight to dust they go.
They fade — those words — to become but small blurry smudges, on a worn piece of paper. All that blood spilled becomes a memory… a bare memory, at most.
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Kimberly Valzania practices mindful gratefulness. She feels creatively driven to write about and share her personal experience and opinion on weight loss, fitness, life changes, adventures in parenting, day-to-day triumphs (and failures), and the truth-seeking struggle of simply being human. She believes that life is indeed a journey, and that precious moments appear (like magic) when you surrender, hold hands, and fling yourself into the great, wide, open.
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