Sometimes, I wonder what writing does to us.
Last night, I was doing my daily two to three hours of editing my manuscript while helping my brother out on a writing project of his own. He was writing a script as an audition for a theater club in college and I was talking to him about the power of dialogue, revealing and not revealing facts about characters, empathizing with fictional people, giving emotional payoff to the audience, yadda yadda yadda. At one point, I asked myself: when the hell did I learn all this?
'Cause there I was telling him to empathize with his characters, understand them - not just know them - and become them. Literally put yourself in their shoes and just write what they do and I realized just how many times I do that in a day.
I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time in November and it gave me a habit of discipline to properly sit and write for at least three hours everyday and immerse myself in every character I write, and I do. I love it, more than anything. And I find myself becoming these strange people, who are so similar and yet so different from me.
If anyone reading this is a writer too, you probably know what I'm talking about. And you're probably wondering why I'm talking about stuff that we all know about. But hey, it felt like it needed saying. There I was, realizing that I was breaking myself into a hundred different people and piecing myself back together every single day. It's a weird sort of revelation and probably a lot smaller than it seems to me right now, but it was still a bit of an epiphany.
So, I do wonder sometimes what writing does to us. I feel that it expands us, makes us so much more than the singular creatures that we are. We are the worlds we make and the characters we create, and every time we step into a fictional person's shoes, we become someone new before returning to who we are. It feels like opening up a walnut and finding a galaxy inside.
'Cause in the end, we're all infinite.
