For Love and Writing

Love.

There is still a part of me that believes that love is a mental dysfunction. The term ‘mental dysfunction’ is used to describe conditions that cause people to have disturbed thinking, behavior and moods. Let me ask you, what sane person would go through the trials we go through for love? Only love can cause the mental break that would allow one to forget themselves in favor of living for another. And after love is lost … Do we find ourselves as we were? No. We find ourselves irreparably altered broken and distorted in the image we have for ourselves. But we love anyway. Rarely by choice do we find ourselves drawn and compelled to love. Love, some say, is like God; omnipotent, all encompassing and larger than our understanding.

Writing.

There is still a part of me that thinks the drive to write is a mental dysfunction. Let me ask you, what sane person would go through the trials we go through to produce a good piece of work? Let’s not even debate a GREAT piece of work. Writing causes a different type of mental break than love does. Hell a mental break is almost required of you in order to write and write well. We take ourselves outside of reality and into a world that exists only in our minds. Then we torture ourselves translating what we see in that world onto the page. Once is never enough. Once we’re done with one piece, like addicts, we begin another, sometimes more than one at a time. It’s a lonely suffering but we write anyway one keystroke at a time over and over. It’s the definition of insanity, but we write anyway. Rarely by choice we find ourselves drawn and compelled to write.

Love and Writing

Love and writing are like alcoholism, or drug addiction. They are mental dysfunctions that we find some sense of peace, some solace within. They make us feel both terrible and terrific at once. They fill us with dread and with desire. They are states of being that we both cheer and despair.

I write for love and I write of love. Love inspires my writing and writing leads me to understand love. In order to be a good writer you need two essential elements, love and truth. If your writing is done in anything but love the reader will know it. If you fudge the truth your readers will know it and all your efforts will be for naught. Writers suffer for the love of their work a dual mental condition. I think I’ll coin it … Lufian Writian. Add it to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.