I have been finding it difficult to write. This is not because I have run out of ideas but rather because I am scared of my thoughts nowadays. The kind of ideas I have in my head are not something that I am used to.
I used to be careful about what I write, trying to hide myself from my readers but for a while now I have stopped caring about what people think. I have stopped worrying about the consequences of my actions and I think that, as a dabbler in the art of writing, it is dangerous to be fearless.
A writer is supposed to write truth. Truth as he or she sees it. My truth may be peculiar and different from your truth but a true writer would have achieved greatness if he or she can convince his or her reader as to the verisimilitude of their piece of writing.
To bring such veracity to writing, writers use different methods but I have tried to use hyper realism. This is actually a technique in drawing that makes a piece of art as life like as possible. That is as simple as I can explain it.
The devil is in the details, you may say. The hyper realist draws every single detail, ensuring that his or her piece is life like on the canvass. In fact, a piece can hardly be differentiated from a photograph. This is what I pursue everytime I write.
I do not stop with the character, I seek the plants, the weather, the insects and small animals, the mood, each and every motion. This I have come to see gives my work a certain level of vividness that I have come to compare to hyper realism. My characters may not be three dimensional. In fact, I rarely bother with fleshing out my characters but the surrounding is always apparent. You can say that my characters are blurred while the setting is always vivid.
In order to achieve such attention to detail, I pay attention to the mist inane things in the world; how birds soar in the sky, the shape of clouds, a rusting key, the sound of a song with all its parts separated, the smell of trash, the steady trek of ants, the way a man holds his spoon or cigarette, etcetera etcetera.
With such attention to the smallest things in life, I have come to see too much and being very aware of my failings, I have developed a certain sense of knowing too much. I feel as if I have seen all there is to see and still understand so little.
To write therefore has become torturous as I feel that if I should put on paper my thoughts and ideas on certain subjects, I might find my truth to be dangerous. I am scared of life. I am scared of man and I do not think we should be let to roam the earth free. We are a danger, not just to our selves but also to the world we live in.
Writing started for me and still is, to a certain extent, a means of carthasis but slowly, over time, it has become the only way with which I can say what I really mean. it has become the way and manner with which my understanding of my world can be made manifest.
Everytime, I pick my laptop or phone in order to write a piece, I watch out for fear that I might scare someone with the darkness in my head. I worry that I might make someone angry or depressed. I fear that my writing could be dangerous for people to read. For not everyone wants to hear the truth and not everyone wants to know you know who they are and who they can be.
Toning down the sadness and depressive elements in my stories has made it difficult for me to write as I would love to yet it is in all honesty, the only way I can make beautiful prose or poetry. With such worries, should I then stop to write or just write nonfiction only? I wonder.
I try not to think too much when I write now. Thinking makes it worse. I find that when I don't think and I let the story fly away from me, I find myself in places that are strange and sometimes beautiful but also dangerous too. It has become the norm for me to delete stories again and again without getting any real traction.
I am trying to step away from all the nastiness around me and try to focus on some good but it is not easy. I hope to one day publish something just to feel published not because I feel that I write anything awesome but I also wonder what sort of story I would have to write that would be worth publishing.
May be it would be better if I quit writing and focus on something more bland. It would take me away from some of my worries. I am tired of writing about death, pain, fear and darkness but it is a I see.
I need to write to stay alive, to breathe, to feel a sense of freedom but I do not want to be broken no more. I want to be able to write happy stuff.