Contradictions Of A Writer

in the past, when i read stories, i just read and enjoyed them, without thinking much about it. it was only when i started writing my own (perhaps not so good) stories that i realized, that, in the stories that authors / writers wrote, they usually contain the dreams, the feelings and the wishes they had.

Follow up:

not feelings about the stories, or dreams about the characters. they reflect the dreams they have in their real life, the feelings they experienced in reality. perhaps, with nowhere else to express it, they turned to stories.

and one thing i discovered, is that more than anybody else, writers want a world of fairytale. perhaps, among all the people in the world, those who wished for a life of fantasy and fairytales are writers. their desires are so strong that they have to write them down and put it in word or picture form (for mangaka and comic artists). or perhaps, there are people even more 'dreamy' than us writers, just that we have the talent to put them down into words.

i once commented about the drawings of an artist, saying that she (as well as the rest) was very good, able to create such fantastic piece of art just by drawing lines. in reply, she commented that we writers have the ability to make people cry using nothing but words. aww i haven't reached that level of mastery yet.

the above paragraph was definitely and absolutely out of track.

we want a life of fairytale so much, that we create stories to match it. yet at the same time, you would have realized that the characters in the stories always wished for one very simple thing. to live an ordinary life. from japanese books like the haruhi series, the famous trilogy lord of the rings, back to japanese manga like getbackers... i realized that books of fantasies always carry this concept with them

that for all the troubles and tragedies the characters in the stories go through, they just want a simple life. to complain about the school life, to emo over romantic relationship problems, to grumble about an unpleasant boss, to fret about school results. you do realize now, right? that these little yet unattainable dreams of the characters are what we experienced everyday as ordinary humans. by ordinary humans i mean, we dont live in a war zone, born with the HIV virus in africa, or a starving kid in india. not that i mean the people are abnormal. just that all these are not the ordinary life that we know of.

in a way, you would also have noticed that the authors themselves live in such a lifestyle. we authors and writers, well maybe you should just call us story-tellers, wished for such an alternate reality so much we began spinning stories about it. yet as if it is a consolation to us who could never ever step out of this reality that we know of, simply because we live in such a reality and we are not God, we created the stories in such a way that our ordinary lives are the wishes of these fairytales.

we wished for a fairytale, yet created a fairytale which looked upon our lives as a fairytale.

is it a futile attempt for us to be content with the lives we had? it feels funny, now that me too, planned my stories in such a manner. what a big contradiction. is it funny or is it sad? that for all the work we put in, we put a final line at the end that says, 'hey! your ordinary life that you are living everyday is actually a blessing!'

of course we heard that line in the past so many times, yet we writers have to find such a roundabout way to convince ourselves. maybe, me too, am convincing myself.

or maybe, these are the thoughts of one writer who deviated from the main stream. or perhaps, these really are also the thoughts of most story-tellers elsewhere in the world, if not all.

what... a contradiction. dreaming about the impossible, and then creating the impossible in a way that the 'ordinary' we have is the impossible in the impossible that we dream of.

listening to : caged bird, by 宮本 駿一

what a fitting song i am listening to while writing such a post.