Why writers write

When Franz Kafka wrote this in a letter to a friend, he was perhaps more preoccupied with the idea of writing in conflict with divine will. But his words still resonate with many who feel writing is a necessity they need to fulfil against their circumstances.

If it's such a struggle, why do it?

I do it because I've always done it. Always, ever since I learned to write. It's a habit. It's the way I've learned to make sense of the world. It's tidying up a messy room of feelings with a string of sentences ordered neatly to make them flow and dance pleasingly. It's an intellectual exercise to understand big emotions. It's a compulsion. It's therapy. It's a way to talk to people from behind a wall because I can't bear the fear of looking at them. It's carving my heart out hoping someone out there will understand.

I don't know what the future holds for writers. Maybe we're the last generation of writers before AI takes over, or maybe we will prevail, and the skills we've honed in over years of refining our thinking through writing will become more valuable as more people rely on software to do their writing (and thinking) for them.

What I do know is that there will always be people who tell stories against all odds, and readers hungry for authentic writing.

Short story of the week — Playing With Dolls (Fragment)

There was something magical about painting a face. The brush, an extension of her short, stubby fingers, caressed life into the soft silicone and imprinted a soul on each feature.

Livia preferred starting with the eyes, which lay on her dining table, finished and drying, next to her palette. They determined the shade and thickness of the eyebrows, the expression, and the mood.

Echoes of high-pitched laughter reached her from the living room, bathed in the morning sunlight coming through the wide, swept-head windows. The girls’ voices, their laughter while they played with dolls in the living room, didn’t alarm her anymore. Instead, she was delighted to share her home again for the first time after the uprising and the war that followed.

Despite her nightmares, she felt safe in her father’s house. After she and Bernard fixed the broken windows and walled the damaged solarium, it looked like the postcards from her childhood—the open spaces; the smooth, floral patterns on railings and balustrades; the light-brown furniture and wood finishes and the small, white tiles. The ghosts of her siblings and friends hanged as traitors and left to rot on the bridge as she escaped the city, still haunted her at night, but they couldn’t touch her anymore with Bernard and the girls at home. Away from town, she became a shadow.

“We’re running out of batteries, and the girls need a few things, too. I can to town go tomorrow morning to be back before dawn,” Bernard offered, turning a chair around to sit with his chin resting on the top of the backrest. Sometimes she thought he looked like her father in old photographs—medium stature, stocky, heavy brow, dark hair, pleasant smile. His cold fingers toyed with one of the eyes on the table. “How many more are you going to fix?”

Read the rest for free on my blog.

From the blog

Anyone who's been in this adulting business for several years will know that maintaining a reading habit becomes harder as responsibilities start to pile up. You look at your stack of unread books longing for those days when you had more free time to pick them up. But what if I told you that changing your mindset can help?

Short thoughts

When should you quit a book? Book lovers know the pressure of finishing something they started. But I propose a few guidelines to know when it's time to make time for stories that bring you joy. Life's too short to read books that make you unhappy.

And speaking of flow, what does your workflow look like? Do you have time for prolonged periods of focused work to achieve the desirable "flow state"? My day-to-day work with this newsletter and my writing in general involves a lot of jumping from idea to idea until one catches my attention. That's helped me write more consistently than pursuing a so-called flow state all the time. The moral of the story is — do what works for you. Even if the gurus say otherwise.

Photo of the week

Quote of the week

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Next week: Why all the negative comments about the Arctic Monkeys' new sound got me thinking about authenticity in art, why I don't write poems very often, and a story about a woman who has a strange question for the hot stranger she meets at a bar.

In desperate need of a nap,

Cecilia