Inside A Literary Mind: How A Writer Views The World

"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true." - John Steinbeck

We do not choose who we are, just like we do not necessarily choose what we do. Who we are and what we do is inherent to us as humans; we have a predisposition.

Being a writer is no different than working in any other creative field. We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

Sometimes when we feel misplaced or disconnected, we have conversations with ourselves. They’re nothing too wild and nothing too poetic, just casual palaver between our minds and our hearts. Our minds desire boundless inquiries, and our hearts just desire what they desire.

Trying to mediate between the two can sometimes be an obstacle. We may feel trapped by our need to dictate our thoughts between lines drawn on white paper sheets. We may feel compelled to run from the words that dance through our minds, but we cannot run from who we are.

This is the beauty of the literary mind. We don't just view the world in shapes, textures and sounds; we fall in love with the descriptive ways we feel the shapes, textures and sounds. We have an inherent need to create.

We view the world in dimensions unseen by the common eye. We store findings in the corners of our minds that many others leave dark throughout their entire human existences.

We fill our cerebral space so much so that our words can no longer stay within such a small space. Therefore, we spill them out through ink, onto paper as a source of mental relief.

Sometimes our stories expel from our minds at such a rapid pace that they are delivered to the tablet without much purpose or direction. Sometimes, so many thoughts leave at once that we feel naked inside for weeks after and we find ourselves reaching for something else to say.

We write nothing, we write too much, we write nonsense, but we always write. And sometimes, we write something so beautiful, so moving and so eloquent that we are fulfilled.

That is when we find peace. For a brief moment, in an infinite space, one of our thoughts comes to fruition. With words; we create songs; we create novels; we decorate movements with speech; we spark change with dialogue -- we make progress.

Although, sometimes, there is no progress in our words. Sometimes, we have beautiful thoughts that turn into unseen poems or unsung songs or unwritten letters to lovers past.

Sometimes, our words stay in the darkest corners of our minds and only emerge in moments of doubt and disarray. But no matter what, they are always there. They make up our entire beings.

I guess one could say that a naked writer is never truly naked. He is dressed in his finest letters, wrapped in his vowels, in love with his adjectives and unseen by his nouns.

Photo credit: Shutterstock