It is not an urge to be heard or read on a daily basis that led me to become a writer. No. If I had my way, I would not be writing this to you now. But it is how things are done these days. What I enjoy about writing is going into my imagination factory and spending hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, and in some cases year after year in effort to produce something that someone else might want to read more than once. I want others to return to a work in order to find a bit of information that they may have missed the first time. I believe that is what all writers strive for, to some extent. If they are doing so for other purposes, then I can’t relate; I still have to work a day job, so a paycheck is not my motivation as of yet. This post is disposable, read once and forgotten. I can live with that. But my other works are meant to linger, to haunt, to call into question the norm.
A good comedian holds a mirror up so we might see our own reflection, causing us to laugh at our faults. They are cynics focused mainly on the negative in society. Many a fiction writer works in much the same way, though our material is not meant to cause knee-jerk reactions but self-reflection on a bigger scale. Sure there are laughs but often they are suppressed because of the time needed to convey a point. So while a comedian causes a belly ache, the fiction writer may only evoke a simmering grin. Yet both try to create a certain amount of introspection towards our own lives, alluding to ways we can use the information as we move forward. These observations and relating them on to paper are the point of it all. Whether someone can empathize with the characters and their journey is the reason we take the time and use the amount of words that we do. That and we lack the moxie to get up on stage and abbreviate what we like to drag out for four hundred pages.
-aap
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