I saw this in a Kuro5hin diary entry[1], and I thought some of
you might appreciate it as much as I did.
[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/?
op=displaystory&sid=2001/3/23/5314/40608
-- Doug Pardee dougpardee@xxxxxxxxxx
=== begin diary entry ===
Why I Hate Writing
By Kyrrin
Writing is like standing in the shower, freezing and chilled,
with one hand on the hot-water tap turning it up in barely-
perceivable increments until, between one and the next, your
back is scalded and your skin is screaming....
Writing is ideas in blood, thoughts from a vein, scrawled
across the paper with deceptively sterile black on white, white
on black, characters on a screen that parade across your
eyelids when at last you seek to sleep.
Writing is a disease that sickens, a charade that pantomimes
the truth, leaving you drunken and dizzy and swearing that you
will never again touch a drop, all the while knowing that your
will to resist will crumble at the first seductive tendril that
makes its way past your barriers.
Writing is choosing what words to lay on the tablet, selecting
each according to some insane inner prompting that dictates to
you in ragged voice, all the while knowing that if you heed
that whisper too closely you will discover that it is nothing
more than the unintelligible murmur of a language you have
forgotten if you ever knew.
Writing is choosing what words not to lay down, all the while
knowing that the words you discard will haunt the edges of your
awareness, weeping and wailing for the life you refuse to grant
them.
Writing is having the eye of the observer, each action
prompting an endless cycle of cause and effect, whole universes
springing to life in the space between one breath and the next,
and falling, forgotten, a scant handful of seconds later.
Writing is the last two inches of a cigarette at four in the
morning, burning unheeded at your elbow while you suffer the
blinding conviction that you are god, and you are less than
nothing.
Writing is indecision and revision, drought and river, shaking
and stunned at the arrangement of thoughts and cursing the
inadequacies of language to convey them.
Writing is salvation, and damnation, and resurrection.
=== end diary entry ===