When you are a writer, there is a very fine picket fence between reality and what you write. Fiction writers spend hours, or an hour at least, a day in their fictitious world, pecking away at that keyboard, and beating the hell out of the computer who just asks for mercy. And I think that writing is a nice pay off to escape the world, other than reading of course. When you write, you get to make up all the rules, who lives and dies, what happens next, and what your characters story is. You can make unicorns burn down the world, or you can make robots attack London; you can make a long lost and dead relative rise from the dead and eat your mother, or you can have a boy trapped behind bars for a crime he didn't commit. You can have the bad guys win, or maybe you can finally speak your mind about the government without actually saying it blatantly to the government.
That is what makes writing so fun.
But then, there is this little thing called life which lives in a rundown apartment, and it's always raining. Life, you see, is a miserable little bitch who takes pleasure in making everyone who bangs her sad and suicidal. It seems, that the only way you can get out of banging her is if you write, or do something other than date her. Life is a cubical and one of those computes where it takes an hour to load that funny YouTube video your next-cubical-neighbor sent you. Life is accidentally bumping into some because your so deep and thought, and then with a bitter pinch of sarcasm they say 'Sorry, we don't watch out for other people'. Yeah, that last one actually happened to me as I was walking out of Half Price Books on a grey day.
The point is, Writing and Life are two very different creatures, and one is just a little bit more depressed than the other. Can you guess which one is depressed?
Writing of course! While Life gets to be the writer, Writing gets manipulated and mangled every which way with every book we authors write. In a way, this is a sorry letter to Writing for raping you so bad and then throwing you in the trash. But, that's what writers do. We work on these epic stories, and then we give up on them, and throw them in the garbage. Writing has it bad, even though it feels so good for us writers, the rapers who tear Writing apart.
But, sometimes you are not so sure which one you are doing, raping or being raped. And so, you must know the distinction between the two.
When you are Writing, and if you were meant to be a writer, nothing else in the whole F'n world matters. It's just know and those keys, or pen and paper, or whatever you use. It's all about those characters on that page, and it's all about the world that you have set out as their stage. It's all about finishing your 2,000 word quota, it's all about digging down deep and letting out all the things you have been holding in, and putting that shit down on paper. Its about writing, and nothing else.
If you were meant to be a writer, then you fell this thrill, this adrenaline that runs through you. You also get the Miseribles, and you sometimes get tired of hitting the poor girl named Writing again, and again, and again. You get tired of seeing her moan on the cold hard ground before you, with her messed up hair in the rain.
The main thing that you need to know when you're writing is that, literally nothing matters, as I have said before. Your friends don't matter, your mom doesn't matter, your frigging' job doesn't matter. If it did, you wouldn't writing. What matters is if Cindy is rescued or not, or if Frodo destroys the ring, or if Dumbledore nearly dies or not. It's all about that story, and this will become very redundant, but it needs to be wired into your brain like it's wired in your brain to go to the bathroom and take a nice, long green dump, or what drives you to eat till your belt snaps in half.
That's writing buddy, that's writing.
And here's how you know if your really getting down into Writing: If you do it out of habit, if you go a day without doing it, then you might just die. It's your drug. It's the reason you breathe air, it's the reason why you shuffle on the subway everyday and deal with that guy coughing right into your face-god that's disgusting-but you know what I'm talking about. It's why you wake up in the middle of the night, and burn your damn eyes out with that scintillating white light that is Microsoft Word.
And now, when you are being raped by Life
The thing to know about Life is that, it's going to rape you. And it's going to do it hard, in the butt. It's going to tear you apart, and make sure you beg for mercy, make sure that you have a noose and a chair to kick over when you get home, holding your ass like you just fell on it down twenty flights of stairs.
Life is going to beat you down, and life is going to interrupt you from surviving by writing. It's that phone call you get and you get distracted into talking to that chick or bro for one and two hours, and then you close the Word to watch something stupid on TV, or to play Dead Island. It's when you stare at your computer screen and cringe, and it's when you spend time writing a blog when you should be writing that sequel that you've been working on since Christmas.
Life is a lot of things, but it's not writing. And by this point, it think you get the picture of when you are getting raped, and raping.
*Sorry for the metaphor, but it's the only way I could explain this without sounding silly.
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