The Writing Process

I have a blank sheet before me. Letters, unformed, uniform lie upon the page, waiting for me to colour them in. I weigh them up, deciding which are worthy of the black blessing of my inky dye to bring them to life.
         Slowly, the tributaries of black printed letters start to flow together to form streams of words, phrases, broadening out into a midnight river of fluid sentences, punctuation marks glinting like the reflections of stars.
         It is beautiful.
         A force of Nature.
         A torrent of language so pure and brilliant that I weep with it, thinking that it cannot stop – must not stop – and neither must I. And so I work at it, and add to it, playing around to see which linguistic chemicals I can introduce to the mix that will brighten it further, make it luminescent in its own darkness.
         I look at it again: and it is still good.
         And so I carry on, adding colours and textures and taste, swirling round in a sweeping vortex of thought and complexity and character – until I find that I present myself with a shit-filled brown Thames of a paragraph, sluggishly coursing through its concrete-bound banks in a thick tide of infected letters, swollen now into blackened corpses of once breathing sentences.

           I crumple my coloured page and start again.

Sarah Cuming : 01 Apr 2010 16:44 |  Tags: Creative Writing Process Prose |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem