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Ah, the vicissitudes of the writing life!
A fancy-schmancy way of saying: I have to believe that all people
go through the same thing I do every day.
It’s one of the writerly assumptions ~ that my experience is felt by
people the world across. Almost every
day I go from the heights of happiness to the depths of despair. Or sometimes I’m in the depths of despair for
long periods. Rarely do I get the manic
happiness for long periods.
But we all feel that way? Don’t we?
Every day is a heroic battle in which we front skirmishes
large and small. We’re faced with an
ever-mounting pile of decisions and dissatisfactions and inconveniences. If we could just make one big decision, it
would be so easy. We could just say, “This
is it! I’m changing my life.” But it’s not like that. We’re beaten down daily
with compromises and indignities.
This, I imagine, is why people go postal or do something
drastic. It’s much harder to handle the
confusion and chipping away at your foundations than it would be to take on
some grand enemy. And so sometimes
people decide to make a grand enemy and get it over with once and for all.
And I imagine this is why a lot of people read fiction ~
either to feel other people’s confusion and to have things said that they can’t
articulate (in the case of literary fiction) or to have forward motion in a
well-defined battle (in the case of genre).
And one of the things I choose to believe is that writing
brings us together in a way nothing else can.
It’s the only technology that allows you inside another person, and
therefore it’s the technology of love and acceptance.
Write on!
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