Method or just madness?

There’s a great discussion going on over at Romancing the Blog about symbolism and it got me thinking about why I write. To entertain? To get across a message? To get my name out there and become rich and famous?  – ok, be right back, LMAO at that last one… (whew!) Ok, where was I? Oh yes, why do I write.

Good question and one which honestly, I haven’t given a lot of thought to. I just simply do. Always have. It’s a part of me. Could I live without it? Absolutely. Would I be living my life fully without writing. Absolutely not. If I go for too long without writing something, I start to itch inside. A restlessness under my skin. A mental caging that’s only set free on paper.

At the moment, due to where life is for me right now, most of the time I live with this feeling as a dull ache – like the kind of headache that isn’t incapacitating, just there. Because presently, I can’t get enough aspirin (i.e. time) in the chunks I need it to completely satisfy and salve this ache. The last time I felt a full relief was after three solid days of hiding and writing – taking only small breaks for sleeping and eating. Any working full-time (not writing) single moms of small children out there I’m sure can tell you that those kinds of “chunk times” are few, few, few and far between.

And no matter what anyone says, writing takes a hell of a lot of time. Time, time, time. Time to think. Time to dream. Time to organize. Time to sort. Time to dig. Time to let the characters wander around my brain so I can get to know them, understand them, hear what they have to say. Time to sit in front of a computer and figure out how to get the story in my head into coherent sentences so a reader NOT inside my head can “get it”. Time to take a four-dimensional Picasso “looking” story of emotion, motivation, passion, belief, impulse and impetus and mold it into finite words without losing the heart and soul of the story that keeps me awake when I’m too tired to stand and my eyes are burning from staring at a screen. And this is before a single word is typed. Then there’s the cutting, expanding, condensing, time-line checking, word over-use catching, character verifying, sequence inspection, plot tightening – god! It goes on forever! Yet it drives me. Sometimes not what I want to do. But always a need inside to do.

And I wonder, why couldn’t I “itch” to sing? Then I could just pop over to an American Idol audition, win the competition and be happy.