The Truth Behind Writing- Aldana Luna
Writing is a real job, a hard job. I dare you to sit down in front of a blank page for six hours – your mind as black as the screen that is patiently awaiting your decisions. We have a million ideas zooming through our brains and we discard most of them, thinking that someone won't like it.
It's not easy, it's not even fun at times. Imagine a wall in your mind that doesn't allow anything out – a traffic of ideas waiting to burst through the pen to your paper, a masterpiece at the tip of your pen yet it just doesn't flow. It may sound horrible, painful, a waste of time – and sure, it is. However there are those moments when the pen glides over the page as if by magic; the words flowing at an amazing rate, one that you follow instead of lead. You're pulled by this wonderful and inexplicable thing that you can't stop, real magic.
You know what you are creating is unique and special this story that you were meant to write. Maybe a million people will read it, or you shove it to the back of your bookcase and forget about it for thirty years. Maybe you'll pick it up in the future and publish it or you put it back where you found it. All that mattered was what and how you wrote, the flow of ideas from your mind to that piece of paper.
Then again it doesn't matter what words we use or what characters we will develop – we are just people that have the gift of re-arranging twenty-six letters so many times that we fill six-hundred pages – the people that read them are the storytellers. They make sense of our thought on those pages they come to love.
There are a million stories in one book for if a million people read it they each take something different from it. We spend a year writing a novel but it's not 'ours', it's for those people who still love holding a book in their hands, those that stay up till three in the morning even though they have to wake up early to go to work, just because it was that good.
We love those people that criticize our work as well, for we know that at last not everyone thinks the same – and that is wonderful. It proves that in an age where “fitting in” and “thinking similarly” are important, there are still people out there that aren't afraid of being different.
We write for them too, they might hate our story but there is no way they didn't learn something. Writing isn't stupid, boring, and sure as hell not easy. We learn from each other and develop our writing, never will we achieve 'perfection', for there is no such thing as a perfect book, yet they are perfect all the same. Writing is a job because it's hard, stressful, and you don't work for one person – you work for the whole world. Even if you don't realize it they are all waiting for you – for you to arrange those 26 letters into a story they can give a definition to.
People think us crazy because we talk about our characters as if they were real, and they are. We spend so much time with them they because part of us.
It's all worth it – the late hours, crying over a keyboard as you kill off a character you love, hours lost to endless words, the daydreaming, the carrying around a notebook just in case and idea pops into your mind. But when you see your friends face when they cry, laugh, get angry, or happy just because of something you created, that's when you realize it was all worth it. The blood and tears that went into those few pages are worth it because of that look in their face as they read your creation.
We fall in love with every single character we create – be they good or evil – for they are, in a sense, a piece of us. We wish, in one form or another, to live their lives – for unconsciously we write about a life we wish we had.
Writing is bearing your heart and soul to the reading and waiting not to be judged. Writing is pushing your mind to the edge every time for those people – even those who know your name just because they read it on the cover. Writing, in and of itself, if a means of escape from the real world.
Check her out here: Adlana Luna
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