What Writing Means To Me

What does ‘writing’ mean?

Ask anyone and they’ll answer,

'It means to put words on a page. To use words to convey something. To tell a story.'

But for me, writing means so much more than that.

Writing means living your life and living in your world but also living in a completely different world surrounded by completely different people; you look around you and you don’t always see the world you live in, but the world that exists only in your mind

Writing means always having a story playing out in your head

Writing means living a thousand different lives from the comfort of your bedroom

Writing means being inside the head of a hundred different people at the same time

Writing means feeling everything your characters feel: their joy, their sorrow, their hope, their fear, their pain

Writing means living so deeply inside the mind of made-up people that you sometimes feel like you’re not sure when a thought is your own and when it belongs to one of your characters. It means feeling like you’re losing your own identity. It means being a thousand different people and also being no-one at all

Writing means the fear that no-one is going to understand what you’re trying to convey through words

Writing means discovering aspects of yourself through your characters that you never realised you had. Writing means discovering yourself, the parts you like and the parts you don’t

Writing means putting a part of your soul into your stories and then leaving yourself wide open, letting other people read your words, read who you really are, read right into your soul

Writing means digging down into the very deepest depths of your soul and coming face to face with the darkest, cruellest, most hateful side of you, and instead of running away in terror at the thought that something so horrific exists within you, being brave enough to drag it up to the surface and expose it out on a page for the whole world to see

Writing means harnessing your sorrow and anxiety and pain and turning it into something beautiful

Writing means telling your own story through a fictional one

Writing means coming face to face with the real you.