Respect for Writing: A Paper Soul

Let's see, the next tweet I twittered was, "Books are extensions of the authors, arduous to write, but not painful. If you have to fight for every word, you're not being yourself."

The crucial difference here is between arduous and painful. Anything worthwhile is in some way arduous. It's arduous to make a long trip, or to exercise oneself into a fit shape or even to hit a selection of alphabetical keys in rapid succession a few hundred thousand billion times until you have a stack of bound papers that could be used as a doorstop or a blunt instrument or, in extreme conditions, an evening's entertainment. It's painful to have to walk a long distance in pants made of razors, to exercise by repeatedly bench-pressing bars of red-hot steel and to have to force out every word with clenched teeth and white knuckles. Writing needs to flow from the heart and the soul like a great flowing river bursting from a dam.

Nevertheless, that doesn't mean it's something easy to do. It's all a matter of communication, like any form of art, the author is trying to say something to the audience through the medium of text. Some things are naturally easier to communicate than others. Telling a lie, for example, is a stressful situation, physically and mentally. You're trying to convince other people of something that isn't true, and in doing so you're trying to convince yourself of something you don't really believe, which is where the stress... lies. That's a horrible pun and I'm ashamed of it. But this is what trying to write something when it doesn't come from the soul, that doesn't come from the central message you want to convey. This is writing made painful, for every achievement you

But something can be just as difficult to say because it's true. This is the essence of literature, the soul of art, the ability to convey a great essential truth about the universe, something that the author believes well down in the darkest pit of his heart, that place inside every living thing where we become more than just flesh and bone, pumping blood and air through sacks of meat in an endless drive to propagate our species, the point where our animal nature ends and our humanity begins. This is the goal of every artist, to take your inner humanity, the deepest, most wonderful parts of your soul and shout them to all corners of the world.

And it's not easy. It's never, ever easy. There's nothing harder or more risky to your psyche than trying to bare your essence to the great unfeeling masses, and nothing more painful than failing at it. But even in failure, there's nothing anybody can do that's more worthwhile.