I’m so excited to share the writing of my new friend, Tim Gallen. (Is that cool, Tim? Can I call you friend?) He’s a hilarious original thinker who is going to be super famous one day. Start reading him now so you can say ‘I knew him when…’ and be famous yourself by proximity.
The Writer’s Life
by tim gallen
Tim Gallen is a writer, truth-seeker, and legend in his own mind. He loves good stories, good words, and good beer. He shares his random thoughts on life at his blog, the daily gallen. Follow him on Twitter or friend him on Facebook. He won’t mind.
String nouns and verbs together; sprinkle an adjective or two and include a choice adverb.
Regardless the alphabet in which we work, this is the writer’s life. It is one of letters, words, sentences, and clauses. Turns of phrase that take hours to craft and years to master.
The writer’s life is one of communal disappointment, split infinitives, and metaphors that stretch too far.
The world often misjudges the dedication, the energy, the life that goes into writing our words.
To the non-writer, words are simply that: nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Simple tools used to craft messages and communicate commands and demands.
Words are easy, but writing them can be bloody.
To the writer, they are more than just words. They are more than mere tools.
They are a piece of us, an extension of our lives. A writer’s words are pieces of his soul, bled out for the world to read.
The writer’s life is one of solitary bloodletting.
As any number of writers have been attributed as saying, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
To write means to bleed on the page, and blood can come in a drip or a deluge.
Writers bleed alone, howling in pain or cackling in madness. Sometimes both. When we’ve bled ourselves dry, we share our life’s blood with the world, ignoring the sting of our open wounds.
Some may nod in respect, others may weep with joy.
Still others may pour salt in the still-healing wounds and say our work is nothing more than a hack job, blissfully unaware of the glimmer of truth within their harsh assessment.
The writer’s life is one of a constantly racing mind, full of thoughts and ideas, both dark and light, uplifting and down-bringing.
A writer’s head never ceases to churn, to move, to flow like the ocean in a hurricane. Ideas, words, puns, phrases, and a billion voices fill this mind that is not quite grounded in reality, never quite present in the here and now.
The writer’s role is to charge head-on into this torrent of imagination, power, and thought to uncover the truth of it all, hidden among the brambles.
The writer’s life is one of the senses: to taste, touch, hear, smell, and see. To charge into the tempest of life and stand in the eye of the storm to declare truth. For the world is full of truth we refuse to acknowledge and recognize with our senses.
Writer’s life (Photo credit: A’Shioji)
The world needs writers to remove the veil from our eyes. We may thrash and scream, we may fall to our knees and weep. But we will no longer be able to deny the truths of our world.
A life of nouns and verbs, blood and solitude, tempest and truth.
This is the writer’s life.
And there are those who shake their heads at writers and say “…why are you doing this, there is a new episode of Dancing with the Stars, on…” I don’t think of writing as hard, gathering and harnessing the words in logical order… well, that’s when the sweat on my brow starts to glisten. Well said, Tim.
ha! dancing with the stars? i’m wrestling with ideas in my head, thank you very much! thx for the kind words, brenda!
“Words are easy, but writing them can be bloody.”
So true! Good post.