A Writer’s Dream: Getting to Pleasure

Once I found a secret story hidden behind a rabbit’s picture on a web page. Clicking the link revealed a journal kept by a writer. It’s been a while now, but the part I remember most was that she found a magic mirror. I don’t recall why she was drawn to put it on her desk and stare into it before she started writing. She said it was as if all her internal resistance to getting down to work vanished when she did that. Writing wasn’t hard when she looked in that mirror. Telling stories turned from struggle to pleasure. She could write for hours, forgetting who she was, where she was. She became a part of her story. I don’t recall what happened to the writer, or even where I found her story. I do remember she raved about that mirror and how hard writing was before she found it.

I want a mirror like that. I want a pill. I want a magic purple crayon. I want a way out of the war that rages every day around this story I’m trying to finish. Too often I feel like I am locked outside my story. I have to slay dragons, cross a moat, scale castle walls, and search a dark dungeon to find the words I’m after. I want a magic spell to chant, or a mystical ritual to perform. I need a tool to make words flow. I want writing to be a pleasure. And it would be, if I could only find the key that will fit the lock that would set my words free to have their adventure and bring home a happy ending.

It’s not that I can’t ever get lost in a story. It’s not that I don’t know the pure pleasure of forgetting who and where I am so completely that it feels like I traveled to another world. It’s just that it takes an awful long time to slay the dragons that stand between me and what I want to say. With this particular story there’s a legion of dragons between me and the end. There has to be an easier way. There has to be some way to make writing pure pleasure.

~Nara

 What’s with the rabbit?.

This post was written in response to the Sunday Scribblings prompt: pleasure. Click here to see what others have contributed here.