The best thing about being a writer is not the fact that you get to do what you love, because it is merely an added bonus. It is not the rank you achieve in the bestseller’s list, because not everyone wants the fame. It is not the recognition and appreciation you get from your readers, because you do not write for them.
The real best thing about being a writer is that you get to be someone else, somewhere else.
You can be whoever you want to be. You can write your own past, present, and future. Each stroke of your hand, each press on the key, is all according to your whim. You can jump head first, take those risks, and it’s all up to you if it will go well or not. Maybe you want things to be chaotic for a while. You can make people love you, adore you, admire you, even hate you. All our fantasies, no matter how wild they are, satiated. You can be at the ends of the universe, the top of the highest mountain, the depths of the seas, beside or far from the ones you love. You can be pretty, tall, skinny, muscular.
But once you get out of that world, the one that you have made, you are back to being who you really are. And sometimes, it feels less attractive.
Is this why we write? To escape the reality that we are living in? Does this make us horrible people, to want what we don’t have and to run away from what is there? Does it make us insane, to have multiple worlds and multiple egos inside of us?
Or maybe it makes us a bunch of cowards, living through the vicarious lives of the characters we weave as they take the chances we wished we did, saying the things we have hidden for so long, ending the agony and pain we are encountering.
Writers are applauded for making such great stories and remarkable characters, that they wished they were there themselves. Don’t we, in our deep subconscious, want to be them as well? And why can’t we? We have made an entirely different universe in the touch of our hand, yet we cannot be as great as the heroes we make?
Is the writer really the god of his masterpiece, or a mere slave to his false reality?
We must be stronger than the characters we make. We must be bolder than how we write them. We must be better than who they are. For if they’d truly lived, these people we imagine and write about, would they come to recognize us as their creators, letting them take those risks we do not do on our own?
Airah Writes 