Today I am cheating and posting something that I wrote earlier, what came after I began the writing exercise of just writing until I write something worthwhile. Here is the something like worthwhile that I came to, which discovery means great progress for me:
"Though my head might be spinning with a thousand characters and interesting things to write about, I will never be able to translate them all into words. Writing is work, just like everything else. It takes discipline, and while sometimes I need to shut off those voices and habits that thwart my imagination, sometimes I will have to neglect those imaginary voices that tell me to write about something else. I will have to tell those characters I have not yet created but are begging to be created, or whom I've imagined and are dying to be in my pages, that I just cannot write about you right now.
It's like sitting and having coffee with one friend. Though I love every person who might text or call me, I must devote myself, all of my attentive faculties, to the person in front of me. When I went to dinner with my boyfriend, he left his cell phone in the car. I said, 'But what if people call about the movie tonight?' (he had been the one making the plans for our friends). He said, 'Sorry, I am out to dinner with you right now.' It is not that the other people are not important to him, it is just that he recognized that that was the appropriate time to be fully present to me. And that is the same kind of honor that I have to give to certain characters I am committed to. I need to get to know them. I need to understand them. I need to think about their world, what they are thinking and feeling. That is when I will become a writer, because I will not just arrange words or tell what is already known. I will make a new person that can only exist in the mind. Not even a picture can tell their story.
Black shapes on white paper will open up readers' brains to a new story and to new people readers never could have known before. I know this because it has happened to me, and to my little sister, and to every person who has cried as they've read a fake person's story in a book. The unreal becomes real. But after all I or any writer has created, we still only touch on something already true. That is why humans connect with it, because they find something familiar in these made up characters, something they already knew or something they longed or hated to think of, and it is mixed together just right to help them to feel something in their lives they wouldn't have felt."
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