where there's hope…

(This blog and most following are written to relate specifically to writers but only in the formatting. Replace the word writer with artist or creator or inventor or any other creative capacity and you can read this blog along the vein that suits you. The implications in this text, are for all of you.)

As a writer one of the hardest things you are ever going to have to deal with is people telling you that your writing isn’t acceptable, isn’t real, isn’t true.

The reason that you can’t acknowledge that as a writer, as a person who’s spent time living the creation they’ve made, is because your writing is your justification of the world. Your writing is you taking all the information you’ve been given, everything you’ve read everything everyone’s ever told you and saying to yourself, ok so this is how the world works. If someone turns around and says to you “look this isn’t what the world’s about, this isn’t right this isn’t the way things should be”  then maybe they haven’t gone through the right emotional stages to be able to understand every deeper aspect of all the real-life situations you’ve been exposed to, and the fundamental reason why writers write…

To Help

You are writers because you care, you are writers because you want to be able to explain the world so other people can understand it, you want someone to be able to look at your writing and go, “wow…that just made so much sense, that just put so much more perspective on the way that I live my life.”

You don’t do that because you are arrogant and you don’t do that because you are driven by some deviant purpose, you do it because you just want to help, and the hardest thing about being a writer is realising that you can’t help everybody. You can’t push people to understand life.  The thing that a lot of writers won’t understand is that people will read your writing and not grasp it. But just because they don’t comprehend it straight away doesn’t mean they won’t get it in the future, it doesn’t mean they won’t understand what you were aiming for once they have gone through the same emotional responses that you’ve already endured.

Because that’s the whole problem, the hardest part about being a writer is feeling unappreciated by not being understood. The thing you have to remember is that people will always appreciate you for your writing. Eventually.  In the same way that you can watch a movie once as a child and not understand it, then come back to it as an adult and grasp the concepts behind the film, such is the development during your adult life that enlightens you to the nuances inside every text you read.

C.S Lewis wrote a letter to a fan of his once in which he briefly mentioned this problem while warning his fan not to read Wordsworth’s Prelude because they were too young to appreciate it and understand it properly.

“you’re bound to read it about 10 years hence. Don’t try it now, or you’ll only spoil it for later reading”

That isn’t arrogance, that’s a strong belief that this piece of literature is going to be the most helpful and beautiful in this person’s life once they are old enough or have struggled enough to appreciate it. Whatever you write, it’s going to make an impact on somebody’s life that five years down the track, ten years down the track they are going to look back BAM “I understand, I know what that writer meant now…” because our task isn’t to write and explain the scenery and the characters and the people, our job is to create a feeling inside people that makes them capable of creating their own explanations from reading our experiences in our words.

CW

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where there’s hope, there’s an author trying to prove it…