A Writer's Rant.

"The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Stephen Dedalus


Forgive me, but, it had to happen.

Sitting here, I find myself at a terrible impasse. As a writer, one who makes use of the written word as his primary means for expressing himself and his art, I realize I am at the mercy of a time and a place where visuals mean everything, leaving words hollow and meaningless.

Through language I strive to paint pictures, and beyond that arrive at various personal and perhaps universal truths. Through a range of tools like metaphor, simile, and punctuation like ellipses or a question mark, I rub two words and then three and then more together to make fire burn on a page.

With my own audible voice, I try my best to communicate the trueness of a feeling, garnishing it with various tones, and pantomimed actions.

I dig deep inside myself for the quintessence of that feeling. I dig it up, and sift it through all the choppiness of inner dialogue and confusion of cascading emotions. I cannot demand quiet because this is a place that is perpetually saturated with sound, that never truly sleeps.

With my eyes closed, I methodically and deliberately string syntax together. It becomes a monologue spoken semi-aloud; no, more so a dialogue I actually have with myself over and over again until it is refined, until the beauty of the feeling shines bright, and I am hopefully liberated by the truth discovered within it. Sometimes the beauty is measured in exquisite pain, and the truth is difficult, irrefutable and permanent.

By that point the voice announces: "I need to write this down."

I sit to process an understanding of the pain I am feeling in order to derive some form of hope if possible from a hopeless situation

I have organized something. Untangled a frustrating knot.

I have given something a name.

I have uncovered reasons for something, and dear God, I think I can change something for the better of myself or maybe others.

It’s my gift. My proclivities lie HERE. It’s what I’m good at.

It’s also a bit of a curse, in a world when everyone asks "What have you DONE for me lately?"

I review every image in my mind; revisit every memory, over and over. It is as though I am traveling back to the past with an aim on changing the present with what I find there. Each time however, I am hopelessly observing from the sideline, like watching a time reel.

The words fall short. Words are forgettable. Words can’t change a mind, no matter how true or poignant. Promises and odes don’t move hearts, no matter how much vindication they are spoken with. Rarely can one argue for another chance at anything.

Strike three is usually always, in most contexts, strike three, and words can’t change it.

Dylan Thomas wrote and recited poems to the woman, or women he loved. His work spoke not just for itself, but for him as well. Perhaps he was the exception to the rule in a world where symbols stand taller and louder than words. Men have painted ceiling masterpieces, and grown hanging gardens. They’ve waged ten year wars, commissioned the building of palaces and pyramids and the world’s first and only automatic Lamborghini in the name of love, devotion and adoration for someone or something. It seems a losing battle however to pit the medium of the written word up against stone, steel, stain-glass, gardens, near human sacrifice and Italian auto mechanics.

Shakespeare’s characters could move nations and fickle hearts alike with their soliloquies and poetic proclamations. What they say is emotionally powerful, unselfconscious, and honest. They bare their hearts and minds to lovers, comrades, ghosts, faeries and the audience, and that’s more than enough. Their words read off a playbook like magic.

Only in fiction...

Everything we do is steeped in some kind of magic. Our minds are like a terra-forming universe, explosions and chaotic bright flashes of light against a sheet of blackness. Out from that we pull something magical, something that is steeped in love.

We draft new worlds or opaque representations of this one, and populate them with characters and animals and other things, giving them a history. The drive to create something and then interpret it is probably the last divine cord connecting us to paradise. We actively steer the destiny of these worlds and peoples. Though they are guided by our hands, we discover just what that destiny is at the same time they do.

When asked why he came to the decision to kill off the little boy in his novel Cujo, Steven King said that he did not actually decide to have the boy killed in the end, but rather, he found him there dead.

Life as a writer can be one of constant anxiety and self-doubt because it is almost entirely dependent on the free flow of a process that is so often interrupted and distorted by, as Robert Lowell once described, the balance of ‘salt’ in the brain. Due to certain physical and emotional dams, certain receptors may become dulled, and desensitized almost to the point of shutting down.

The lifeblood of the process lies in discovering the numerous shades of color in the world, recognizing a melody in the even the simplest tone, and moving fluidly to that special rhythm of cause and effect. We take all these pieces singularly, and put them together into one fluid kaleidoscopic color sequence, lyrical progression, or rhythmic waltz.


We have to find the pieces behind the scenes. Hidden, beneath the leaves.

However, it’s from behind the scenes that we conduct it. With one leg there, and another back here, we plug away at a typewriter, and make something that then seems to exist free of us, as though it spontaneously willed itself into existence. In comparison with what we writers create, we ourselves don’t seem nearly as bright or colorful. So we remain in its shadow

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..."

No problems there. No one usually does.

How often is an actor or actress worshiped in the end based on the myriad of personae they step in and out of? How often is it that backstage, or once the music stops playing, the person with the guitar or microphone is still the impetuous rock star-poet? For that matter was he ever? Crowds seem to think so...

Our work doesn’t speak for us in the same way.

We want to take people to these places, but they choose to go by themselves. They forget that we conjured the magic they get lost in; took elements of life and made a story out of them, deciphered the most difficult emotions and brought them to the surface. They forget walking with us is to walk through the process with us.

If the process hits a muddy snag, they can help bring us back to neutral and offer a push. This may be a difficult time, but there’s a dedication in it for them.

Maybe even a character...

We can reveal nuances about the world they couldn’t previously see.
The pictures are up to them. We just help them to see. Help them use their mind’s eye, and open their heart.

How else can you yell without making a sound? Speak in different languages without moving your lips? Tell a secret without the need to whisper, or confess something utterly stutter free, without self-doubt?