Why do you write?

Why do you write? Is it distasteful to you? Is it a task like cleaning the house or mowing the lawn? Or is it a joy to you? Something you look forward to. Do you think about your writing day and night? You must connect the links of this chain in just the right way. If one link doesn’t fit, you go back and rewrite until it does. In this chain, there are different-colored links. Red, yellow, blue, green and black.  Each link represents a different mood of the piece you’re working on. Black may not look like it fits, yet in each life there is sorrow. We may want to alienate grief or blackness from our character’s life. Yet we can’t do that if we want our writing to represent real life. There will be happy times or yellow of tranquility and good days of blue skies, but if we do not write of the dark times that happen in every person’s life, we cannot expect our readers to relate.

So we weave together stories where our characters come to life. They breathe, they weep, they experience sorrow and heartache. Happiness and joy. Hopefully, the story becomes so real our readers weep, almost shout for joy. They feel what the characters feel to the point where they feel a loss if someone in the story dies. As writers, we must experience joy, sorrow and heartache for and with our characters if we want our readers to feel the same. They must feel terror if they are facing someone who will take their life. The reader might be safely seated in his or her living room or lying in bed. However, it’s my job to make their hearts beat faster, to feel so unsafe, so involved in the story they feel as if the killer is in the same room with them.

So, bringing this to a close. Like a child’s coloring box, every color has a purpose. The blackness of life is just as necessary as blue skies or the yellow of tranquility. If I leave out one color, the picture is not complete.