It pays to write

Explanation

This short book was written to reintroduce myself to serious creative writing with a degree of rigor that suited my temperament at the time.

The character is a writer, and very little is done to embellish upon the character or his personality. The idea is to use the character to drive the story forward like a car. The story, not the character, is what's important.

The work blends element of the real into a created universe, rather small but not resembling real life. This is like a testing ground for the character to drive his car in. Again, the focus is the car.

The work is generally meant to be skimmed. There is thematic content that has been purposefully woven into the storyline but if it is not relevant, there's no point in discussing it. It is not central to the work nor is it necessary for understanding it.

I wrote this to primarily re-engage my creative faculties which had been languishing for a while. My creative faculties are the car. Since the main character is a writer as well, this work describes a writer's world in relation to his work. The writer is referred to on occasion as the proprietor to give the sense that more exists of the writer's life that isn't discussed at length in this work.

The writer is in some respects a reflection of myself, though to keep the work scientific and healthy distance was created between myself the author and the writer as protagonist. Some of what the writer encounters are experiences pulled from my own life. There may be some deeper significance to uncover.

Since my creative faculties are the car, what our writer is doing is propelling my (not his) work (or my faculties) forward using his productive effort. Who our writer represents, I do not know. He was a vehicle for me to ignite this writing mechanism of mine and give it form and manifestation in these words.

The book was not intended to be remarkable. However, I think it has value because it gives some shape to what a writer feels and experiences. Not ground-breaking. But from my perspective, it attempts to remove anything of glamor and focus on the life of the writer. It helps us forget our associations and consider how a writer is viewed and treated.

You may argue that this can only be one sort of writer, but I'd argue that this writer is more universal than you might think in the present day. What this book dwells upon is the insistence that the way we write makes it a lonely occupation for lonely people.

You may ask, how could I know if writing makes a person lonely? Again, I am going by how a writer is viewed and treated. They can have a social life that's brilliant and still be lonely. I'd go further to say that writing must become a more social endeavor and that we as a writing society have not made this happen, perhaps because we are apprehensive to share our drafts and our struggles but want only the finished product to reach the light of day. I think our writing societies of the future must share more openly with one another.

I know people do share drafts and they do invite criticism. That's not what I'm commenting on.

View this as a springboard for conversation. I think the written word holds a lot of potential. I know people share widely and criticism critiques. The point this books makes is that criticism is just part of the work, whereas writing is an activity that generates the work. Other activities go into generating the work, but we focus on writing here.

I think it's important to read a book like this on writing because it considers writing as a path out of our communication struggles. It uses language in a way not to impose, for the reader wants to impose. It uses language in a very basic way. This is no accident as I am out of practice and thus had to write this way. It's usually not my style. In this book, I try to write in a way where the reader comprehends in the moment without having to go back or without being hung up on worrying about what happened or what the book is trying to convey.

Thus, I would read this book through briskly. Of course, I told you this at the end, which is unfortunate but the organic outgrowth of my writing process here. This final chapter occurred to me after the work was complete.

This book is very much a sketch and is fully intended to be taken as such though a sketch is no less valuable than the painted canvas, inherently. If it is, then our values should be reconsidered. I'd hate for someone to think that I rushed through this for some reason. Stylistically I think the hasty writing is appropriate here.