Being Broken

I did a lot of travel today at work so I had a lot of time for thinking. I spent my time dwelling on writing and what makes people (like me) want to be writers. Let's face it, writing is neither the most glamorous nor the most financially sound career on the planet yet people swarm to it by the thousands; each struggling to catch that elusive brass ring. Why? Oh, I understand the desire to have others read your words or to leave something substantial behind when you cash out of this little game we call life, but there are so many simpler ways to do those things. Why writing? I pondered on this all day and think I have an answer.

We're broken.

Looking at my own life and the lives of the (admittedly few) writers I've known and considering what I've read about the lives of my favorite professional writers, we all have that one thing in common: we are broken. Our lives have been filled with pains, tragedies, and horrors that shatter us on the inside. We are -or were- lost, friendless, wounded animals left to lick our own wounds in the darkness. For people like that, books are often the only friends we can find. The only place we can go where there is understanding and compassion instead of scorn and abuse.

For a lot of us, that was our childhood, for others there were tragic events that destroyed our adult lives, but I think there is a common thread of pain and loneliness that ties all writers together. Writing is a form of empathic communication for us. Sounds new-agey, don't it? (Yea, I hate that pseudo-psychic aura-cleansing crap too!) Bear with me here for a minute though.

Words are the closest thing man has ever discovred to psychic communication. With words you can evoke emotions, memories, even create feelings inside other people that did not exist before. We can transfer thoughts, concepts, and visual images with just words. Now, refine those words. Tear them apart and structure them in the most delicate manner to convey exactly the emotion that you have inside you and that emotion can be recreated -tranfered if you will- to another individual in total. Empathic Communication. The masters of this form of communication we call: writers. Wizards of the Word who can transfer not just isolated emotions and images but entire worlds of complex thought and feeling. We can feel their love, hope, despair, fear and pain. Especially the pain. Remember: we are broken.

To heal ourselves we need to vent the pain before it reaches lethal levels. We need to ease the hurt and we need contact with others who can understand and help us bear that pain. Readers. Targets who can absorb the emotions we transmit via our Word Magic and comprehend them. We have to touch others to verify we are not at fault for the horrors we've been through. We need to test our own beliefs of what is right and wrong within us and the only way to do that is with Empathic Communication.

We write.

Now, I realize there is an exception to every rule (and shame on you if you take anything I write as a rule!) and not all writers come from dark places but I think at the very least there is loneliness and isolation in all of us who reach out through the written word. Writers are loners by nature of the lives we've led and writing is how we reconnect with the humanity we've lost. Luckily, some (hopefully most!) of us learn to connect again through more than just written words. The act of writing helps us discover that communication -empathic or otherwise- has to flow in two directions. We learn to live again. We learn to trust and we learn that because we've been hurt before it doesn't necessarily follow that we will be again. Consider this quote:

"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Broken is not ruined. Broken can be healed. I was broken and I'm better now than I ever dreamed I could be. Writing (and the folks I love!) have helped do that. Maybe that's your story too. Maybe it's not and I'm completely off base here. Drop a comment if you like and let other folks hereabouts know why you write.

Are you broken? Maybe writing about it will help. Feel free to use this blog.

Later!