What They Don’t Understand

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when
he’s staring out of the window.  ~Burton Rascoe

The same is true of the husband of a writer as well. I told this to my love and he laughed, but I didn’t know what that laugh was supposed to mean.  Coming from my point of view though, it is the truth, unless you are married to another author.

“Why don’t you just work on one book at a time?” He asked me last night, emphasizing the word ‘one’ when I said I am working on two.  He doesn’t like that my main manuscript has sat in a file on my computer, unfinished, for a year and a half now while I continue to work on something else.

The truth is that I am working on it.  I am continually thinking of how to end it in the right way, what trials to put my main characters through so that they will grow into what I need them to be by the final page of my book.  I need to tie up the loose ends that I created months ago without making them look sloppy and quick.  My book needs time to sit and age like a good wine.

He doesn’t understand that I can write no matter where I am at.  That I will pull out my cellphone, or scribble out passages onto a napkin. When I tell him what I am doing he looks at me like I am crazy and goes back to what he was doing.  But inspiration hits anywhere – someday we will be laying in bed and it will come and I will have to roll over and flip the light on to start scribbling away even at the risk of waking him up.

Sometimes, he doesn’t understand my need to write all the way through, without hardly stopping for sleep, even when the writing’s bad.  But creative flow, whether bad or good, shouldn’t be stopped because after a break it will be difficult to get back into that moment.  Besides, the editing process will cut out those long, unneccessary ramblings about a table.

When I write a scene of emotions as I am feelilng them in my own life, or write something cathartic, he may not understand why I am putting myself through that.  Even though it makes the writing more real and vivid and releases the emotions pent up in my breast, giving me a sweet release. It may bring back the pain of a hurtful memory, but at the same time it calms me and heals me in a way that a non-writer may not be able to comprehend.  If I spill my inner secrets and mask them as someone elses in my writing, that too, is a form of release. It may not even be a concious effort to do so.

What people who don’t write will never understand: that the writing we create is a part and an expression, not just of the life we live, but of our very soul.

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~ by JennaChristine on June 8, 2011.