6-27-13 RMB Resonance

6-27-13 RMB Resonance

Dear Rita Mae Brown,

Why do we write? Where do the words come from?

I know it is common for a writer’s words to flow without thought, without a plan. Characters take on a life of their own, words travel in packs and accompany one another on the page filling in blanks and expounding on facts.

I wonder where the characters, and their worlds, live prior to the author taking pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard. Are they within the author? I am sure some would say yes, especially if they had never written before. But once you have written a story, felt it come to life, allowed the words to flow of their own accord, there is no denying the magic there.

At seven I wondered who was writing the story I etched onto paper in pencil. Yes, I had wanted to write it. I had started to write the story. But someone else, something else, was finishing it. Honestly, it scared me a bit, and yet I could not stop it. Like a runaway train, it carried me all the way to “the end.”

The same force now holds me captive until 1am and awakens me at 4am…to write, RMB letters and my stories, the words dance the dark hours away, hours previously spent in deep sleep. I am powerless to stop them until, from pure exhaustion, my eyes close, sometimes still sitting on my couch with keyboard upon my lap.

I think we have more help than we realize…another entity? God? a higher self within us? other souls?

I don’t know where this invisible force comes from and it applies to more than words, an inspired painting, a movie…a garden, a special meal, a certain recipe, a team effort, a work of art or work of greatness, if only in the briefest of moments…or carried through the life of the work, often on to those that view it, read it, relish it, long after its creation…think Mona Lisa…(grin) or Rubyfruit Jungle.

As I touch up the rough edges of my want-to-be-a-novel story, America, I see the theme come full circle. The story concludes itself and suddenly makes more sense than before. I am more the listener than the teller of it, the child in me being read to, the adult in me carrying the story forth in written word for others.

When I ask, for the umpteenth time, why a friend likes these letters, she responds “They all have everything you want out of whatever you read…They all have resonance.” That is where it lives when the work is complete, the unseen force, the magic, it lives in the resonance.

Still in awe of it all,

Loraine