This is an answer to a question I happened upon in my inbox. You asked for any advice or thoughts I could give someone aspiring to write. I will attempt to outline many things that keep me in my chair from one day to the next. It isn’t money, fleeting notoriety, or having books in print that keeps me here (and thank God for that.) The first time I read something that moved me, I immediately recognised that art is a gateway to worlds of feelings that didn’t have names, the life that was bubbling inside me, blue-lands that were taking shape. I found that experience so heady that the first hit has me here, some thirty years later, still going. Still going at it.
one
I am a reader before I am anything else. I have been reading all my life, so the specificity of the first book that moved me evades me now. It’s further back than my memories go, I’m afraid, below sea level. As I have said in previous entries, I was lucky, so lucky, to have a mother who read to me and read to me. She wanted books to be easy for me to dip into, understand, and learn from. Marcia Daley-Ward inputted a love of the written word into me in such a generous and deliberate fashion. This was our land. Why couldn’t it be? We nurtured a growing facility of language. We would fight in the language. We would love and reason inside it, paint our house with it. We invented our patter out of patios, old songs, memories, and how some words might taste. Reader. I’m telling you all this because when I write, I feel like I am exchanging ideas with you, even though you are not here. Your part comes now, and now, as you read this, rendering our circle complete. In reading and writing, we make it so. We are not so lonely anymore because you understand me understanding you.
two
Very easy to fall in love with the way that someone uses their words. It happens all the time. I still remember the exact, deliberate phrasing in lost moments uttered by people I don’t know anymore. I often say that love is the thing that remains. Sometimes, it’s all locked up in the words.
I was working in an insolvency practice in my very early twenties. There was a man there who - oh lord….well, let’s say he knew how to send an email. We would then exchange witticisms via messenger throughout the day, which thrilled me no end. He was always reading a great book in the lunchroom. Kryptonite.
We had a very intense crush, buoyed by the sentences we would send each other during the afternoons (some of my finest work.)
Write with something behind it. Write-flirt. Write with intention. Bend the language to fit you. Make it yours.
But really, I’m not suggesting that you start a wild office affair (would I?) But I will say this. Write letters to people you love or are falling in love with, or those that are dear to you, or those you don’t know yet, or those you wish to know better or even those you used to know. Let the shape of your feeling meet you on the page. You may find it beautiful.
I love romantic me, and I’ll take any opportunity to spend time with her.
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