What Is Writing To Me?

As a new writer, I thought today about what it means to write. So, I thought I would share my ideas.

For me, writing is about creating a world that doesn’t exist, but could or may have, once upon a time. It’s about a world where the spiritual basis for the world has meaning beyond our own, beyond our shallow needs, and beyond human longing and desire. It’s about writing in a sphere where deeper, often ironic truths can safely exist side by side, and the multi-faceted, contradictory aspects of a more spiritually engaged yet conflicted world can still reside.

It’s a world where conflict or drama is driven by the essential and often hidden meaning embedded in it by its Creator; a place beyond our own realm where so many of us seem trapped in our striving for power, money, love, acceptance, and fame. For the motivation to write about anything should be to dream of such places, where the motivations of the men and women that live there exist for purposes beyond purely their own.

It’s about building worlds where people can no longer try to hide behind lies and half-truths about themselves; where the beautiful and often ugly truth about themselves must eventually prevail and be thrown upon the grand play of the world, where they are given full light. Only then can those characters, elevated by the truth, rise or fall, like the Twilight of the Gods in some Wagnerian opera.

It is about the pure joy of writing about worlds where real love exists, relationships are truly sacred, and two people can become one in a love that is not fleeting, nor tied to contracts, social expectations, or money, and which lives beyond their own time. For bonds can be deeper than what our world portrays. And the depth of those things no longer have to be physical, but spiritual, enduring, and deep.

Writing is about exploring the vibrant life of the mind, where adventure and exploration of the natural world is driven forward free of morality or purpose, but for the joy of discovery alone. Yet within these worlds must rise again the eternal battle between right and wrong, good and evil, whose savage conflict cannot be delayed for long, nor hide within the fallacy of shades of gray said to exist within us all, and which seems to pervade our world today. Yet in our written worlds, that sacred conflict of good and evil can never ever be truly resolved, can it? In the worlds we create we can clearly see the conflict as it truly is. For it exists in ourselves, not the world. The expression of it all hides within us and thrives there alone. So through writing can we give birth anew to the eternal conflict of good vs evil within the self fully expressed on the page of our books, and freed of this world’s meaningless and futile events that often rage on without us and beyond our lives.

But we must have the courage to separate ourselves from our needs in this world to truly write and see the sacred conflict of good and evil inside our minds and hearts. Those battles are something archetypal and eternal, born free of sin or regret, religion or relationships. They are sacred things that are eternal and which only the enlightened religious zealot in this world has seen. The fight for life and death, good and evil lives on after we are gone, does it not? It therefore is eternal. That’s why the archetypes of Jungian mythology of good and evil can be explored not in the world but in our minds, given new life so it may live again in our imagination and writing.

Writing is about seeing a better world where friendship endures. It is about a vibrant and emotional place where relationships exist, even beyond the sacrifice for another through death. For in our written worlds such choices can help us see the true heroism and joy of those that die for others or for the sake of love or love of the world……ie the tragic hero, the Mono-Myth of Joseph Campbell, etc. Redemption via character arcs can reach its final stage for those led astray in our fantasy worlds, unlike our own. Such is the nature of Greek Tragedy. As writers we can return to it, thrive in the tragedy within our stories, and re-investigate relationships that often fail in our own world.

In the real world we live in as authors, the events of life control us in such a dubious way, though we deny it. But we all must someday finally face the fact that many things wielded by our Divine Creator lead us down paths we naïvely portray as free will. Writing allows us to transcend that, and become the Creator, driving not just conflict and moral lessons in our books, but freeing us from the lies in our own, allowing us to see the spiritual dimensions of the men and women in it, and their true selves beyond their needs for romance, love, family, power, fame, money, and control that motivate so many of us. All these the Creator has given us, yet are we all blinded by them. In our writing we can give our characters a truer life, allowing them to be trapped like us but supersede those things. For if we are creators ourselves, and empowered by our Creator, then truly we have a spiritual dimension that allows us to see beyond our physical and social entrapments given to us in this world. Our writing frees us to explore that, if we just have the courage to choose it.

Writing our worlds is about the eternal Fairy Tale of life and the irony and strange meaning expressed through the slow unfolding of the events of our lives over a lifetime, until we see truly the real mythology of the lives we created for ourselves and the grand illusion of moving towards often meaningless goals that disappear before us like wisps of a fog in the night. Writing allows us to encompass that truth and go beyond it in our stories.

The world we write about is not just character development. It’s about the elevation of life’s choices as they affect the world around us, and the secret meaning and story behind the play we are all sucked into together; where truths that exist beyond one’s fate is shown upon the mythic stage of life itself. For something drives us forward that is so very meaningful and mythological, yet seemingly unknowable. A creative force alone we soon find has filled our life. And so through writing story, one can explore those hidden themes through the lives of our character, and in a deeper more profound way that reveals so much about our world and our lives not seen before. That’s why ancient mythology, Christianity, and all world religions affects us through the stories found in their sacred texts.

In the end, writing about our fantasy worlds allows us to be free of the failures of this one, and yet grasp its suffering and joy equally, embracing them both in a more intense acceptance and love. Without that understanding, we are trapped in it; trapped in our needs for money, power, love, marriage, fame, and social acceptance. But through writing, we can dream of elevated ideals of love, relationships, sacrifice, joy, hate, and growth of the self that cannot ever be realized in this world, through religious faith, relationships, politics, philosophy, or learning. For better or worse, writing allows us to explore the archetypes within us, and the symbols we assign unconsciously to all those feelings, emotions, meanings, and the world .

For as long as we write with honesty and with a curious mind, moving beyond our shallow needs in this world, the spiritual world and its meaning can be revealed in our writing and stories. Through creation alone are these things shown. Writing frees us yet reconnects us all with our own lives to those we love and the world around us if we can dream with depth of heart and spirit of world’s beyond our own, always driven to search for more through our love and understanding of this world.

-The Author



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