Tag Archives: words

rebellion

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masked person holding a flag in front at a crowd at a protest

if you sit down in a room or in a corner of a cafe or bar and write you are engaging in an act of rebellion. you are choosing to go against the norms of polite society and do something out there. you have made the conscious decision to shun communication and contact with your family, friends, colleagues in order to sit down and put words on the page. you are being deliberately antisocial. you are saying to other members of society to leave you alone. you do not want to chat about the weather, their day, what to have for dinner, a program on tv, what’s happening in the news, the wider world. you don’t want any of that. you demand silence. to be left. to be left to sit in your corner tapping away at a keyboard or scribing on a page. those who dare interrupt are in danger of releasing a beast of contempt at being so thoughtless as to dare interrupt the great undertaking of putting words on the page. yet later. we may forgive. and come worming into your affections asking you to read what we have written. to comment upon it. (positively). to exalt our act of rebellion.

if you sit down in the corner of a room and write you are engaging in an act of rebellion. you are stating that you will be different from the others. you will create something that no other before has created. you will carve your own path. you will prove the gate keepers wrong. battle the market forces. to produce something that has only value to you but none the less should be shared widely. you demand it so. you will think the gate keepers blinded. foolish. lost. how could they have failed to see the brilliance in your words. the genius that lay within. you will show them. again. you will fight. you will put more words on the page. give some away free. to hell with market forces.

if you sit down in the corner and write you are engaging in an act of rebellion. you are cramming together things that should not be put together. crossing the genre boundaries of reason. forming situations that question the status quo. asking why? what if? to think and write is rebellion. the taking of ideas and expressing them when others may disagree. may question if such a path is wise. you do it anyway.

the rebel must be protected. their source material saved. their output sought. shun the bland. the conformity. embrace the different.

divided worlds

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there is separation that exists in all writing. the writer knows it is there. tries to ignore. pretend it doesn’t exist never existed shouldn’t exist must not exist does not deserve to exist but nevertheless persists in its existence. it hangs there. on the edge. like a small snag of fingernail that catches on a jumper as you pull it on and with a sudden sharp pain makes you aware.

a writer sets out when writing a piece in a belief a commitment a fallacy that what they imagine to be what they can imagine to be will come to be. will exist. once they have put pen to paper. drafted. edited. rewritten. checked. line-edited. drafted again. but it is not there. the thing they imagined does not exist. their writing cannot not create it. even if they were to train a million apes brought up on shakespeare how to type and gave them their work to work on for a million years the problem wouldn’t be solved. the final draft would exist but be lacking. would have a distance between the imagined and the reality of the word.

this distance is what writers have to live with. each time they put pen to page. make their plans. start to write. they know they will not achieve the story they set out to do. that there will be a piece lacking. a slither where their skill was just not enough. but they lie to themselves that this time it will be different this time they will be better and sometimes they are and this time they will put their all to it and pull each and every imaginative writing sinew to the creation of their work. but they know they tell themselves a lie. that it is a lie to get them started. else they would never begin or go mad during the writing process.

that is why all writers are great liars. they tell themselves most fundamental untruth to themselves and their reader. they see this is what i had planned this is what i intended now buy my perfect book. but we know this to be untrue. and the reader and writer join in with this lie. form a bond in untruth. until the next time.

words

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words are watching you
they gather your thoughts
they tell your secrets
they spread lies
and state truths
they can break a heart
they ruin friendships
or destroy an evening
beware words
they can imprison you
or set you free

This poem came about as I was mindlessly watching tv and thinking of the impact that certain people’s words have had on others. It got me thinking about the power of words and how easily they can be misused to create harm.