Saturday, July 17, 2004

More Words To Make Me Think, ponder-ponder-ponder

I received a comment to the piece I had written about Virginia Woolf.  It was from Alex, a fellow Blogger (Dylex linked on my page).  He said, and I quote:
 
I think that you are just realizing that none of us are cardboard characters. It has been my observation that most writers that are perceived as "successful" have had a series of "challenges" that have either "revealed" themselves / human nature or allowed them to truly examine how that "event" ultimately came to pass in terms of steps of a drama and "character" development which is always the basis of a "hot" story. In other words a writer has to be a little "off the wall"!!



Being a writer myself and looking at just how I write and when I seem to get most of my work done - he is quite right, and I owe Virginia Woolf, and so many others I was beginning to look down my nose at an apology.
 
It seems when I am covered over in the depths of darkness, in roiling turmoil is when The Words are at their very best and do not let me down.  I rely upon them, turn to them like the best friends I have always known they were and lose myself in the stories, in the creations we weave together.  It is with regret I pull myself away from the worlds I visit through them and my imagination to my own Reality, forced to face the world I live in again.  There is almost a painful separation for me between the world of the written word to come into Reality again. 
 
Yes, I do understand, in part perhaps, the darkness of Virginia Woolf.  Yes, it frightens me.  Not because I am afraid it is going to inevitably win over me, as it did her, but that it may come close? 
 
Through Alex's words I see Virginia Woolf, not as a cardboard character, but as a real person.  No, I may not have liked her, but now I can look at her life a little more deeply in my research and find even more respect for her, and for her craft.
 
If "off the wall" is a sign of a writer, then I exhibit many characteristics that can be considered thusly.  I enjoy writing with black felt-tip pens and certain first drafts should only be written in journals first, and, well, personality wise we just don't have enough time to go there I think.  So, when some woman (or man) 100 years down the road looks at my works and tries to see me and then reads an autobiography of me, then researches my life, are they going to like me?  Some will and some won't, but hopefully, just like Virginia Woolf is to me, I won't be cardboard to them.
  
 



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