Deceptively Simple: The Writing Game

This thing we do called writing is deceptively simple. Not only does it require copious amounts of time, but the reward and satisfaction can take months, years even, to come full circle. It’s a curious thing how any artist creates their art--not just the actual process involving paint or instruments or dance, but the compulsion. What compels art? Specifically, what compels writing?

Often when I’m online I see profiles on various websites where people say, for example, that they love horses, have a nickel collection, and like to write. Sometimes it seems to me as if the whole world is full of writers. I think this is true, to the extent that everyone has stories, and because we live in an mostly educated world, everyone has the skills needed to put those stories on paper.

Verbal story tellers have their own place, of course, and that’s an interesting talent because it’s very immediate, both the telling and the hearing happen simultaneously. For introverted writers, that would be a quite frightening proposition, and yet the reception of the work is very live and vibrant. Many people have written about the sound of spoken words (often relating back to poetry), and it really is a different way of thinking about story.

So even in trying to introduce what I want to talk about already we’ve encountered several fairly complicated ideas, and we haven’t even been discussing the mechanics of a novel or a short story or a poem.

My mother always says my dad is a story teller. He is great at telling jokes at Thanksgiving and stories of things that happened when he and his siblings were kids. When I was younger, he used to tell me and my younger sister stories--that is, until we started to “interfere” too much by telling him what we wanted the story to be about. Why did we need him if we were going to dictate the entire thing?

Maybe the fact that my dad said we might as well tell our own stories started something in me and is part of my compulsion to write. I found that his stories, and our involvement in his stories (“you should make the character shoot lightening bolts from his hands!”) were often wish-fulfillment oriented. I think this is something many writers start with, turning to the page as a way of fulfilling things they can’t in their lives, and so begins the complications. Intentions led to words.

Another reason writing can be deceptively simple is that it does not involve muscle-memory the way learning an instrument does (unless you count learning to type). It is not immediate (you cannot demonstrate your skill instantly as you can with an instrument), and even if you want to show someone what you’ve done, it takes them awhile to read. A series of paintings or photographs can be viewed much more quickly, even when the viewer lingers.

Drawing to the conclusion of this post, I find I am more interested in what makes writers tick than by the original question. If you have any thoughts, they would be welcome here.