Writing

I recently realized something that doesn’t make much sense. There’s a subtle hint in some of the classic literature-the best example I can think of is My Antonia by Willa Carter-that there’s something deeper. A theme that wouldn’t make sense if you could face it head on, but somehow courses through your mind with a soft impression of…something. In My Antonia it’s the relationship between Jim and Antonia, the relationship that’s unending, constantly in flux, and very mild. No matter what it’s subdued. I believe this is so that you cannot understand the nature of it. Of course, there are a few things that you can pin down, but all they do is confuse you further. A movie that has this same hinting is the Fantastic Mr. Fox. When I watch that movie, I see something dark and shady hiding behind the scenes. It disturbs me a LOT. That movie is a “kid’s movie” and I can’t explain it, but it seems like there’s a message behind it that would like to jump out and destroy you. (Needless to say, I don’t like that movie very much) I feel it the most in the scene where Mr Fox encounters the wolf. It doesn’t make sense, and that’s almost what scares me.

Whether or not you understand me to any level, to put it simply, I believe that in many works of art, there is a subdominant theme put there to make you think, or to lead you somewhere. This theme can be good or evil. It all depends on the artist, the creator. Through this realization, or belief, I began to think about what writing is to me. It certainly isn’t an ‘art’ in the way most people think of the word. It doesn’t express my deepest thoughts, it doesn’t entertain me (well, that kind of depends on the story, but writing in itself doesn’t entertain), it doesn’t sit there looking pretty. None of my writing (true writing, not assignments) is written for other people. Some of it may be written for God as well, but it’s always written for me. I write for myself, not for anyone else. I guess that seems selfish, and it may very well be.

Writing is a tool. It’s a shovel, for digging up some of the deepest, cloudiest thoughts or treasures that I’ll ever have. Writing is for knowledge. Writing is for an expedition into my mind. I believe only the best authors can take others with them. Anyone can express what’s in their soul, but not in a way that others may understand. Writing is a flashlight for the shadowy, cobwebbed corners in me. Sometimes it casts bigger shadows, and sometimes, as a shovel, it throws the dirt right on top of something even more important. But you don’t curse the tool for that, it’s yourself that’s the problem.

The moment after I came up with this analogy, I realized I’d said it before, a few years ago. I’d written that writing was a shovel to dig up the treasures of my thoughts. Now I can understand that even more. Writing digs up those things that you can’t name, that you can’t understand. Things that twist and morph into the strange shapes. For once I think I can find some sort of speck of meaning and depth in those weird twisty sculpture things they call modern art. I’m not sure if the artist finds meaning in it, but I can look at that (it’s kind of like the labyrinth painted onto cathedral floors) and think of something that has depth and interests me. I can just see someone less innocent than I  reading this and commenting, “Um…the true meaning of that is a lot less…yeah, it’s not what you think it is, that’s for sure.” But the point still stands, as long as I don’t know what the author’s intent was 🙂

What I mean is, some things twist and turn so much that you can’t even tell what they are. Their shape is completely to themselves. Those things appear in writing, and I’m not saying that this is completely secular, a lot of who God is is impossible for us to understand. If I could take a reader in with me, to discover through writing something that great, something with a shape all it’s own, like nothing they’d ever seen before, something beautiful and strange and meditative, then I might just be almost as good as C. S. Lewis.

TWIST ENDING!

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