Love

Confucius was a wise man, but in terms of loving your job, he only had it partially right.

You can find what you love, but it’ll still be work. It’ll be hard, it’ll feel overwhelming, you’ll still struggle, want to give up, want to scream and rip your hair out, but it will have a greater sense of reward between the struggles and the hair-pulling screams.

As a writer, it feels like a desired touch is just on the other side of the glass that we just can’t quite ever break through. We can see the characters—the kinds of people we wish we were or the kinds we wish we knew. We feel how much we crave them, how seemingly close they are. If we could just break that glass to be on the other side…  But then we also recognize to be on that other side, we would’ve had to have survived something terrible, something worth writing about. Then begins the wager. Would I go through the terrible thing to have that life, to have those people? The answer is always a resounding yes. And that leads us back to remembering we’re still pressed against the glass, doomed as eternal spectators, watching this magnificent world. And there lies the beauty of being a writer, creating worlds that become so desperately craved, not only by the writers themselves but others as well. 

The love of writing isn’t a small love. It’s BIG. If my fingers were broken tomorrow, it would feel like a near death sentence. Often, I tell people, “Others are addicted to drugs, while I’m addicted to writing,” and they laugh, having no idea how much I mean my words. If I don’t get my writing time, I go through withdrawals. My thoughts will become so consumed with my characters, their world, what they’re talking about, the images that make me feel so desperate to write them that I’ve forgotten why I walked into a room, how I’ve gotten from one side of town to the other, or lost my attention in a conversation with a person standing in front of me. The wager between being a present mom, housework, or marketing my latest novel can be lost to my imaginary worlds if it’s been too long since I’ve last had my fix with a keyboard. I can sit for hours or days straight with my computer, phone, or a pen and paper and be so immersed I forget to eat or do anything else. As someone who has children, I can confidently say I love writing as much as I love my kids, I would fight for them equally, and when having to choose between them it’s painful. Of course, my kids win because they're human, but it still hurts sometimes.

I’m frequently asked how the ideas for books come to me, and the most honest answer I could give is, I don’t know. They are there, and just a simple thought away. Once I was on my way home from work and witnessed a near-miss accident between a truck driver and a motorcyclist. I wondered what the guy on the motorcycle could’ve possibly been thinking, and suddenly, there was a character in my mind. I could feel what he was feeling, but I couldn’t name it, and I didn’t have enough knowledge to understand why. As soon as I got home, I let him tell me through the eyes of the most important woman he’d ever met. Then days later, my father-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer and another set of characters came to mind. In the middle of watching my family wonder about our future without the man who was the foundation of the family, my mind wondered how differently that would look without kids who were grown, with a marriage that was closer to three years than thirty. Maybe I could answer the question of how ideas for books come to me. Emotion. Living, breathing emotion.

All this to say, writing is my love. It holds every emotion I would otherwise struggle to express. It allows me to experience not only my life with a different lens, but any other life I could possibly imagine.

Happy Reading Friends ~ Elly