A Writing Experience: The Moment of Truth

Thursday, February 11, 2010

I can’t stop writing.

I can’t stop writing.

I thank GOD for this gift of words.

Writing is pleasant but is it never easy; nothing though is easy. When I couldn’t write I feel very messy and angry. I feel incomplete and crushed.

Truly, I write anything: letters, quotes, easy poems, ordinary stories – real and unreal. I tell you a lot in words. Those that mute me and those I find divulging. But then, the spaces between what I tell you are the more important deals.

A writer knows what ideas to pick and what not. If you are the responsible type, of course, you will know the consequences it will bring everyone. And you dare or you dare not … Inside your stomach the energy fills in like whirling water that want to gush forth. You want to come and reach the climax of the creative genius. This is the writer’s moment of truth. Thinking how to express and convert in words line you with steaming energy the gods emit. It is like you’ve eaten ambrosia and forever eternal. And it makes you crave for all the words to spit slowly or vomit or tongue gently.

Writers, generally, have big hearts; but they are often mad. I am often mad, that is why I am able to write. Well, it doesn’t matter if readers would like my stuff; what matters is I will share something, and in one million readers, at least – a soul would find me. And another, and another – until I spread the light of the creative work.

Right now, I just felt I have to write. I don’t know what to write. My fiction is at halt, my essays are so ordinary, my letters are the language lessons and family/friend updates, my blogs are waiting for an input about popular culture. I’m typing old manuscripts slowly. I’m researching for literary texts (to borrow) and share about special topics. I’m on with monk duties retyping prayers (which I impose on myself). This is my writing life; and still -I have got nothing to write. I do monologues. I talk to the Saints and to GOD, and ask them, “What is Your verdict?”

Chores and in between I long to grab a book, a pen, a paper, and crave the keypads on the PC; in between a litany of Hail Mary’s – I wait that GOD would somehow throw me a kiss, and I would feel the strength and joy of the work I love to do that moment of truth: write!

I read from Hemingway (A Moveable Feast), that after writing his story, he felt always empty and both sad and happy, as though he made love.

Well, I could not be Hemingway, I am just like anyone, You, sometimes existing, sometimes missing: “The Moments of Being of Virginia Woolf.” During the write process, I can also see, no barriers stepping into the mine fields, as if, I will let it explode and get the experience of a war. The war in me. The war inside me.

And then, I will end my stories. And I will be ready for the next one of the nothingness or the moment of truth or what Kierkegaard calls a "leap of faith." (an interview of the writing master Edith Tiempo by famous poet Marjorie Evasco)

And so I try to write, and keep remembering the letters of Rilke in his “Letters to a Young Poet” (Translated by Stephen Mitchell) saying, “A piece of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.”

Here I thought I am doomed; but no, I am not: black and white, irony, paradox, advocate, “que sera sera.” Thank God and thank God, I am given in this way. Hence, we all experience moments of grace where God tells us to find meaning.

We would share these special moments.

Rosalinda Flores Martinez, 2010
11:30am