On Writing

To write is to let your heart, all the feelings and emotions pent up inside, seep into the pen at your fingertips and bleed onto a blank canvas. A torrent of feelings, experiences, the past, the future, memories, dreams, aspirations- all flooding lines and margins to create a page of you. Your heart, laid upon a sheet of paper, exposed to the elements of criticism and interpretation, praise and opinion.

Writing is a burden. A demon, hovering on your shoulder, whispering thoughts and ideas into existence, an inception of inspiration, weighing you down, stirring up long-suppressed emotion, lingering on a single fragment of feeling until it swells to an unbearable magnitude, then- release. Pen scratching on parchment, anger and sadness and joy and contentment, striking the lines like bolts of lightning, relieving you of your affliction and scattering it into letters, sentences, chapters- until it is bearable.

When you allow yourself to write, to let loose the words, phrases, and tales swirling in your mind, you lose a bit of yourself to the pen. Letting a paper absorb your anxiety and bliss and memories is like allowing yourself to be opened up and examined- an autopsy of your thought processes. The allowance of such a process can be spontaneous or drawn out- to open up your mind can take any length of time. The art of dissecting your thoughts, molding them into coherent concepts, and eventually fashioning an actual piece to be read by others, is an art free from the chains of time- an hourglass with no set time span.

Whether writing is a battle to be conquered and overcome or a consolation and escape from reality, to write is to capture imagination on simple, lined paper, and expose it for the world to view and perceive.