Flickr Image via Creative Commons by Fredrik Rubensson
1. When you’re not writing - and are naturally pre-occupied with your quotidian life - you are forced to become present so you can remember it all and write about it later. Additionally, despite stereotypes to the contrary, a writer is greatly served by improving their mental and physical health. Living with clarity of mind is one of the hardest, but most rewarding, and overlooked, aspects of the writer’s life.
2. When you’re writing you get to dive deep into a subterranean emotional world, a world of cosmic energies, that normally, people too preoccupied by the maintenance of life, cannot go to. When you get your writing “right”, you get to make others feel what you’ve felt. Bridging this gap between self and other, living in this interdependent way, is one of the most thrilling imaginative relationships a writer can have. (For the extremely introverted it may be one of the most thrilling relationships, period.) It’s what keeps the chase alive too because it’s so very, very hard to achieve.
3. When you revise you get to be a builder. Getting in there and tinkering with sentence, moving words around, moving one paragraph to the top and deleting another…it’s like putting together a building, you get to figure out how a sentence is constructed, what the fabric of the building needs to thrive.
4. This is the best bit - you get to read! And better still you become a better reader.
5. And then you start the cycle all over again - it all works in a glorious harmony.