This semester I am enrolled in two writing workshops. When I mentioned this to one of my professors, he asked me, “Are you nuts?” It was far too much reading and writing. I would never be able to keep up with my schoolwork.
I still wanted to do it.
For me, writing is much more than a job or a grade – it’s my passion. I write because I want to and not because somebody tells me I have to. Of course, having a deadline is fairly persuasive in getting me to want to write, but that’s beside the point.
Writing is important to me because, in a lot of ways, writing is like life. It’s life, only it’s told through a specific lens. One book’s lens may be focused on Harry Potter while another book’s lens may be focused on Mr. Bucklesby who goes for a walk through Central Park every Tuesday with his wife. Books, and the writing within those books, show us truths about our lives that we sometimes forget or don’t even know.
It is my job and the job of fellow writers to tell those truths. The only trouble is that sometimes we writers don’t always get it right.
That’s why my writing workshops are so important to me. I can write what I see to be the truth and then have twenty fellow writers point out flaws in my interpretation of the truth and suggest better ways to tell that truth. I will make mistakes, but I have people to help me along and reach my goal.
The other day in my writing workshop a fellow writer was having trouble depicting the struggle between the father of a son that drowned and the boy who was responsible for the son’s death. All of us around the table were bouncing suggestions off one another until a suggestion of how the two would interact and what they would say suddenly made all twenty of us pause and say, “Ohhh!”
Such agreement amongst writers is legendary. But that’s what we are working for: that “Ah-ha!” moment.
Life is the same. Nobody knows the meaning of life (unless you consider the answer to be 42). We have to make choices that we think are best and, more often than we’d like, we make mistakes. Of course, there are almost always people looking to help us out and point us in the right direction again. We can only hope that we’ll finally zero in on the answer to a perfect life. Then, when we have the answer, we can all pause, sit back, and say, “Ohhh!”
Read Paul About It 