Wednesday, July 8, 2020
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To be a writer, you can't just be one thing. You have to be everyone, from the extra to the main character, you have to become them. You have to be in their head, know their past and their hopes, their dreams and issues, you have to know what drives them and what scares them. You have to be heartless and a underflowing heart of love. You have to want to watch lives crumble into nothing with a smile on your face and have a burning desire to do whatever it takes to save another. You have to have a mother's urge to protect and you have to have the madness to giggle as you separate a family. You have to be everything, because it all comes from you.
Writers are like actors, a thousand masks and disguises, so many roles and characters they can play. But, writers convey everything through words, nothing more nothing less. Actors have a stage, costumes, props, lighting, a set. Writers create the place, the clothes, the objects, the time and lighting, the entire scene. Writers have to be everything.
A writer must be a non binary fan artist in love with their girlfriend, a demon who finds screaming like music, a boy who just got granted criminal immunity, a god of old legends, a goddaughter of two immortal beings. They must fall in love over a thousand pages, be tortured to the point where their body is more scars than skin, be slowly killed in front of their family who can't do anything about it, descend into the pits of madness, be twisted to evil by someone they love.
A writer doesn't just write. They become the people, become the setting. They live thousands of lives in one book, fall in love and be torn apart, have their faith be shaken and pull through, be killed and kill, give into the darkness and bring the light.
I think that's why sometimes I can't tell what's real and what's not, because I am so many people, have lead so many lives already, have met dragons and demons, have fallen in love in so many different ways. Maybe I feel a disconnect to my gender because I have been a boy and I have been a girl. Maybe I see everyone as beautiful because I've fallen in love with so many diverse people. Maybe I write so well because I can slip on a mask and be someone else, something else, without a thought. Because these people are me, in some way.
Writing is about giving into that secret desire deep in your heart and playing with it under the guise of it being a character. I can delight in torture without scorn, can be a sappy romantic, can adopt everyone and hug them close. I can be a jock, a nerd, a wise old hermit, a parent figure.
Writing allows me to escape to another realm, another plane of existence. I can be whoever I want, infinite possibilities and infinite ways it could go. The villain and turn into the hero, the laws be rewritten, the young overthrow the people too obsessed with wealth to care. Morals can be explored, the base of humanity observed at it's rawest, most vulnerable moment.
Being a writer means I never truly know where the story ends and I begin, but I'm happy because it means I never truly have to leave. I will always be in the story and the story in me, always be able to express myself and my hidden depths through paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence, word after word.
It's like living lives inside of my overall life, lives inside of lives inside of one single life. I think that's the beauty of stories.
Stay safe kiddos, remember to practice a little bit of self care every day!
All my love <3<3<3<3
~Ink
