Sunday Scribblings: Writing

She’s written one thousand, five hundred and forty-three pages of twelve point Times New Roman text in the last year. Perhaps fifty people have seen portions of it, and only two have read it all. The writing is commonplace, neither great nor terrible. She makes her errors, misspellings here and missing punctuation there, but no more than most and far less than some. It’s mostly prose, green shading to blue, rather than purple. She writes in response to the prompts other people give, and in turn prompts others to write. None of it is publishable—she hasn’t even tried. An editor would use the SASE after reading the first page.

But her sister read it all, as it was written, and she laughed and liked it, for the most part.

She writes about people, all sorts. Broken people, whole people, cracked people. Strong people, weak people, happy people, and sad people. She writes about sneaks, and she writes about honest blokes. She writes about hope and anger and love—sometimes too much. The people she writes about feel too much, or too little, and sometimes nothing happens to them so they don’t feel at all, but are put in her writer’s refrigerator to keep them fresh for later use. Every one of the people in the story is somehow connected to each of the others within three or four degrees, even the ones she doesn’t write about. She is the Kevin Bacon of the story. She tries to keep everything cohesive but sometimes it spirals away, stray wisps of hair blowing on the wind. Sometimes she’s happy with what she’s written, and other times not.

But her best friend read it all, as it was written, and she said she was happier and hopeful, for the most part.

She writes for a readership of two, sometimes more, and ignores her mother, who thinks it’s a waste of time. She smiles and nods to her father, who thinks it’s a form of social networking. She jokes with her brother, who sometimes writes with her. And she keeps on writing.

It’s worth it to her.