People love stories. It doesn’t matter whether they are
spoken, written, or watched. But, the enjoyment of each delivery system is
different.
When a story is spoken, the listener uses his own
imagination to add details that enhance the story. When a story is read, the reader uses his own
imagination to add enhancing details that personalize the story for them.
However, when a story is watched the story the writer wrote is enhanced by the
music, the director’s vision, and the nuances added by the actors. These
stories, although fine in themselves, are not the mind-candy of spoken or
written stories.
Who provides the mind-candy teasers? We do. We are the
writers of the written word. We battle technical demons—our computer software,
memory machines, and other actual mechanical things. Then we argue over the
best grammar and punctuation, spelling and word selection to give life to the
story. We hope to breathe emotion and life into our characters. We fight over whether more reality or less is better in every scene. The fantasy world we work in sometimes fights with the
fantasy worlds of our readers, editors, and other professionals needed to
bring the best story to the market, hence re-writes.
Is it any wonder that we sometimes take on real world
problems and leave our writing world to go to the dogs (dust covered)
occasionally? Yet, we all would rather play in our worlds than do our real
world every day duties. That is the insane part of the writer’s human
condition.
Give us a beverage of choice, some extra pencils and paper,
a couple of writers and we can while away time in a frenzy of fun…oh my.
I wrote this to remind us all that writing is exhausting,
exciting, and intricate—but necessary to all
people. Keep up the good work.
Best,
Nina
Now to figure out how to get this posted since I
inadvertently picked up a Trojan thingy trying to hook up my mom to football on
the computer last Sunday and in getting rid of all such infections erased all
of my passwords. If you see this on the 10th. I was successful. If
you see it later—well it will be after a break and a cursing spell.
