I wonder if it’s possibly the fate of all writers to spend our whole lives tortured by the fact we think everything we write is shit.  And then we accidentally drink too much (which as a group, we have been known to do)  and write something we actually like but upon sobering up realize it’s overly cynical and even we begin to question whether or not it’s satire.

No wonder we lost all those facebook friends.  If we can’t even decipher the tone of our own voices with all our literary prowess, how can we possibly expect the less literary minded masses to pick up what we’re laying down?  Oops.

Are we all really just hopeless romantics?  And I mean romantics in the literary sense.  Are we all just so morbidly in love with freezing ourselves in time that we almost obsessively sacrifice ourselves to a lifetime of self-loathing vomited all over loose pages very few people in the grand scheme of things will actually read?  Or to a lifetime of living near or below the poverty line?

Or is it simply because we must write.  Because words build up, and build up and it becomes imperative to put them somewhere at risk of exploding all over everyone like an eighth grader’s Maltov cocktail splattering gravel all over your high school parking lot.

It’s probably a little bit of both.  Maybe we are a self-depricating, generally miserable bunch, and maybe we absolutely have to write to save ourselves from ourselves.  Either way, the romantic in all of us proves quite useful when clinging to fragments of hope in the eventuality of bestsellers and literary prizes (aka our words reaching a large audience), no matter how difficult and poverty inducing the process proves to be.  Because if none of us clung to the idea that our words can change people, and inspire them to take action in improving themselves and this earth on which we live, then there wouldn’t be any literature at all.  And imagine our own childhoods without books to fall in love with.  Now imagine the things you could have fallen in love with instead and recoil at the contemptible idea.

Keep writing.  Keep hammering at that typewriter, computer keyboard, or obstinate piece of paper.  Your words are gifts.