The act of writing stories is an act of love, borne out of pure dedication and nurtured day after day. Like the pruning of the bonsai in Marge Piercy’s “A Work of Artifice”, stories are carefully raised and grown into masterful pieces. But instead of the bonsai’s limited potential, when one writes, creation blooms and unfurls to its greatest. 

When I write, it reminds me of the video “Scavengers”, where the stranded astronauts pull materials from the world around them to create something new. Writing is much like that, the blending and twisting and mixing and suturing of ideas into one large project. When I write, it’s like delving into the ocean, an entirely new world underneath the normal one. It’s freeing and liberating to be able to express all of my ideas and creations and watch them unfold. It’s like paint pigments uncurling in water, spreading out in directions unknown.

Photo by Jonas Allert on Unsplash

When I write my story, there aren’t many ways to explain the elation I feel, watching things “come together in so many different ways.” It’s not an understatement to say that I’ve spent hours upon hours typing away to reach where I am right now. The road was full of trial and error, and if you look into my writing, it reflects my growth as I advanced. Yet with that, there were also hard days. Days where it would take forever to plan out the chapter and bleed it out onto the screen. Days where I put my all into a chapter and send it out into the world, only for nothing to come back.

Some would simply ask Why? Why do all of this for almost nothing at all? No money, no formal recognition?

Well, the answer is pretty easy.

Background from Children Who Chase Lost Voices

My mind is a crowded, busy thing. Oftentimes, it’s filled to the brim with information pouring in from the outside. But, it is always, always churning with creativity. Deep below the streams of calculator numbers and noble gas notation is a bustling world of its own. On many a day, I find it bursting to the seams. Through writing, I pull “a single fragment of the whole” and share it out. It’s a way to grasp that dream world, and twist it like cotton candy to shape it into what my heart feels content with. Even though it’s tiring sometimes, I still adore writing with my whole heart and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

It’s about the journey, it’s about falling into step with the characters and dancing in the rain when they dance. Most of all, it’s about my unending love and passion for this world at my fingertips.