What Matters

After so many days something should be written. And we are in the midst of Christmas. So much has happened, and so much more will be happening. I feel like I ought to write to writers, or write about writing. It's the holidays, and I've a chance to rest for the first time in a while, so I've been slow on the end of calling up Reflections and working on just how we want to publish this novel.

What is on my mind as I prepare to be a writer who has his works on paper where people can read them? As I enter this world? I'd be a fool not to consider what I am doing this for, or to whom I am writing. I think of this everyday. There are some people who write and write just to explore their feelings. They are their own audience and it is rather like talking to hear yourself talk. I do talk to hear myself talk. And I sculpt for the pleasure it gives me. Those things are mine. But writing is to be shared.

I think for everything I write, I scribble in the hope that it does someone good, someone I don't know. That is a matter of faith. My family will never read a thing I write. Or they won't understand it. My friends are no different from any other writer's friends. Most of them will never read me either. It must be that I am writing to someone I cannot see. Someone I trust is there.

I was riding the bus out of downtown, thinking of this the other day and stringing together events for a story. I thought, "That is it. Everything I tell is more or less true. In a way there isn't a thing I haven't written that has happened either to me or around me." But when I am telling a tale, I am never in it. It must be that to make an event relevant, at least as far as I am concerned, it must cease to be relevant only to me. And to a large degree removing myself from it, turning it into fiction, makes it true. And makes it matter.