The Literary Writer

The desire to write, particularly stuff of the literary kind, arises in people of a certain type; people who don’t fit in well with society, or those that generally don’t remain in the celebration mode, often turn to writing to get what life seems to have denied them. Writing requires a little optimism even in the most despairing of people. There’s a little hope in them that if their writing is given recognition, there will be some reason for them to be happy. It is this little hope that keeps writers going. But more often than not this hope is like a mirage that they keep chasing but rarely ever reach.

One who is quite satisfied with life will rarely become a writer. He or she will not need to write. Perhaps such people will have enough friends and social life to keep them reasonably occupied or they may have other kinds of pre-occupations that take up most of their time. Something in their life will keep them happy and occupied. What is the need for them to become writers? Writing fiction is like entering another world imaginatively. Writers make their own worlds in which they decide what they want and what they don’t. It is a selective world that is very much like the real one but in it, there is poetic justice or there is tragic art that offers sufficient compensation, a compensation that comes with projecting whatever seems wrong with the world.

Writers possess something that makes up for whatever they’ve not succeeded in getting; a powerful imagination that helps them to take for real something that is dreamlike and unreal. They have the capacity to treat the world as a dream and find everything they desire in that dreamlike experience. Shakespeare compares the poet, the lover, and the lunatic saying that each of these can find something where nothing actually exists.

The writer finds a great deal in the moment of creation and can then look back on what has been created for satisfaction. The writer can be said to have a philosophy that treats the world as a dream and no more. But that dream is to be taken rather seriously. In other words, the creative mind first breaks up the solid material world into a dreamlike substance and then rebuilds a tangible world from it. This means building ideas that result from a powerful imagination; ideas that have the power to change the world.