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Writing
is the Water of Life
By Frederick Su
Ah! Writing is the water of life!
Without writing, there is no reading.
Without reading, there is scant imagination.
Without imagination, hope cannot reside in the human spirit.
Writing is such a lonely business. And to think I once thought that pushing
around physics equations was a lonely business. But, then, I worked in an office
or bay with fellow like-minded scientists and engineers. But this writing! Whew!
It's like I'm alone in a desert and the only way out of my misery is to write.
Because it is the only way I can live. The words that flow onto the page out of
my soul is the water of life. And it is done alone, like dying is done alone.
I turn on the radio and listen to the music and news of the outside world while
I plumb the depths of my brain for the inner workings of my mind, the
protagonist's mind, the villain's mind. I write about joy, sorrow, pain,
anguish, hope, good, and evil in rhythm to the music. Emotions are coaxed out of
me by the magic that is music to become the magic that is good writing. Music
breathes life then, through me, into my characters. In this little world of
mine, that is neither dream nor real, I am the creator.
A fiction writer is, after all, a god. He or she brings onto a page a world of
life that the reader can believe in. That world, though imagined, though founded
on the most improbable foundation, once laid, has to be as real as our everyday
lives. Curiosity about that imagined life, set to paper, is what keeps a reader
turning the pages of a short story or novel.
We are born, we die. In the interim, we live our own challenges, our own joys,
our own despair. That is true for everyone and is true for fictional characters,
too. It is not so much the destination that is important in fiction, but the
task of getting there that matters. It is the voyage, the journey, the odyssey
that drives the story and, at the end, the epiphany, the climax, the denouement
to wrap it up. I hate "slice of life" stories because they have no
end.
I believe the character should suffer physically or psychologically, whether
subtly or egregiously. I want to drive her from sorrow to rage to joy. Make her
suffer so exquisitely that it gives me goosebumps, raises the hairs on the back
of my neck, makes me weep and feel sorrow. When I do that, then I know the
writing is good-- that I can read it again later and be pleased. Why? Because
emotions are a bank deposit and, through good writing, we can tap into it and
feel the longing, the ache, the pain, the sorrow, and the joy.
Why writing? I was trained as a physicist. I once knew equations like a writer
knows words. I wasn't bad at physics, but I wasn't great at it. And I didn't
want to spend 70-80 hours a week trying to be great. As I got older, I found
that words flowed easier for me than equations, that I could more readily create
and describe a world with words rather than describe a new physical reality with
equations.
Past the age of 40, almost everybody realizes that he or she isn't going to live
forever. I wanted to take a serious stab at leaving something of worth behind me
when I die. But, it's not easy. This writing life is harder than getting a Ph.D.
To make a living at it is almost impossible.
Why suffer all this torture? I believe we all desire a reinforcement of our
self-worth. Writers crave it more. We writers are all egotists. Don't let anyone
tell you differently. What I want is some measure of fame, some measure of
fortune. So I keep plugging away at that dream. But to capture the dream takes
hard work, and that means to me one keystroke at a time pounding out one word at
a time into one sentence, one paragraph, one page at a time to form a story or
novel one heartache at a time.
Some publishers, though rejecting it, have even written about An American Sin:
"This looks like a novel that will definitely find a home..." and
"Good luck and don't give up. It will happen," and "Overall, the
novel is strong and the characterizations are good."
But after ten years and two near misses, I finally decided to go it alone as a
business to self-publish my own novel. After all, I’m not getting any younger.
I wanted to pin wings on the thing and see if it can fly. So I’m throwing it
out into the great market of expectations, and I’m hoping.
Hope is light. A glimmer of it rises over the horizon and, in the gray days,
waiting for the numbers to come in--numbers that will tell whether I’m a
success or not, it slices through the clouds onto the gray-green waters below
and reflects off it like light off a diamond.
©
1995 by Frederick Su. All rights reserved. Revised 2003.
Frederick Su’s novel, An American Sin, was the winner of the Multicultural
Fiction category of the Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards 2002 and was a
finalist in two others. See www.bytewrite.com.
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