A Stranger Asked Me What It Means To Be A Creative Writer. Here’s What I Confessed.
By: Michele Giarrusso
Tags: Creative Writing, Writing Life, Inspired Writer, The Writing Cooperative, The Innovation

A Stranger Asked Me What It Means To Be A Creative Writer. Here’s What I Confessed.

“I’ve always wanted to write.” A sliver of sun somehow found her face through the clouds that blanketed everything else in the park. She bent down to pet my black German Shepherd. “I have such great stories to tell.”

“No doubt you do.” I offered. I sent Samson off to play with a friendly white miniature poodle that had found it’s way into the large-dog section of the park. “Have you ever written anything?”

“You know, I just can’t seem to get started. Maybe someday.” The light breeze carried her words away.

I uncomfortably pulled the zipper on my wind breaker up and down as I considered what she had said. I wondered if I should tell her that if she was a writer, she would write. ‘If you could, you would,’ as the saying goes.

“Tell me what it’s like being a creative writer?” She tapped tapped tapped her thin fingers against the wrought iron bench. “I imagine it’s so romantic just writing all day.”

I laid my head back against the park bench spitting out my last bit of breath so I may feel dead stillness in my own body. My lungs rebelled forcing me to bite at the air deeply to breathe again.

Writing? Romantic? All day? I decided to confess my answer more for my own edification than for her knowledge. I instinctively knew she was not one of us.

‘Oh, writing.” I sighed at the thought of it. “Writing. That thing that consumes the soul until its relieved and released by the pen, or death. Whichever comes first. Both are quite deliciously painful. Raw. Personal. But, only one affords the writer the luxury of living forever. Isn’t that why creative writers birth the story? To live forever?” I rambled on from there enjoying hearing myself talk.

“Creative Writing as art is so much about living in the past. Thinking about the past. Getting to know the past intimately over and over again in a passionate affair that ends with a draft of words that is the story. Writing is an effort in spectacular rumination in order to blaze forward into an unknown destiny that which only the writer knows until the created characters begin to write themselves, as they so often do, revealing their glory to their creator.”

“The writer’s mind is the arbiter of reality in all its make-believe, and the pen is the instrument of life. The effort is to craft of a story from the mind’s recesses a world and a people that has always existed, real or imagined, that wrestles for a life of its own on the page.”

“Oh, the wondrous misery of being a writer. It’s a calling where the pain and the joy of a thousand yesterdays can be relived and retooled, refashioned and remade to create new worlds and new life that will never live beyond the story. A creative writer selflessly writes a reality of their own making, sacrificing all they are in search of a kindred soul in a reader, so they can let their story go and never look back. Once the story has been birthed it forever belongs to those who take in its words. The writer becomes inconsequential. Does a story even exist if there are no readers?”

“Writing? It’s so much more than a story. It is also a freedom for those whose artistic medium is the word. Writing is freedom from every compulsive thought. Freedom from every self-imposed draconian edict to release the never ending words that are born second by second in the writer’s mind. The ability to craft art through writing is a wretched gift that takes dynamic discipline, emotional fortitude, deep sensitivity, and a convoluted fascination and repulsion by the human condition. Its a gift that no recipient would ever forsake.”

“Oh, those pitiful souls whose intellect is cursed with the burden of shaping reality to save it from itself. They relentlessly hear the rhythm of language, ideas, and character in their own mind moving viciously, knocking into each other as they become story. Writers dutifully listen to the word-song in their mind while the heart rebelliously dances to its irregular beats. The writer must find solidarity between the bombastic star-crossed internal battle of the heart and mind to prune the emerging story that is born of a perverse internal dance.”

“The creative writer intuitively molds the thoughts and feelings that make up the word-song into a story-thread to create a world that is both true and unreal. This is done by writing out the words that have already been written in the mind. But, not before those words are carefully curated through the gloriously tortured patch-worked heart to tell a story exactly as it needs to be told, benevolently letting the story write itself, not afraid to be both creator and conduit. The only thing the creative writer fears is not being able to write at all.”

“As such, the writer naively hopes that the onslaught of the delightfully vicious thoughts and feelings that produce the call to write will eternally create a new story for them to tell. It’s not merely a calling to write. It’s a forceful curse that fervently pursues its host until every story within is written. Its a hope only the hopeless have for inevitably, one day, the story must end.”

“The creative writer knows that if the thoughts tarry, and the feelings subside, and the words cease to be written because the word-song stops playing, the writer will surely die. The final period at the end of the last sentence.”

“That’s what it feels like to be a creative writer,” I told her in response to her question. But, she was no longer listening. She had moved on to some other fantasy while I remained steadfastly ruminating over our conversation fashioning it in my mind into a story that demanded to be told.

“Why, that just sounds awful! How could anyone live like that?” Thankfully, after that insight, she left me in my stupor on the park bench so I could better hear my own mind.

Hurriedly, I obediently began to create a new story yielding to the discordant rhythms of a new word-song playing in my mind.

“The story is never finished until there is nothing left to add.” I mentioned to myself. And, I began to write shaping reality into a story just the way I wanted it to be.