This morning I found myself in a familiar place, right in front on my laptop. I could hear the clicks my fingers make on the keyboard. The same blinking line of the screen winked at me. Start your song, it whispered to me. Its voice was the only sound I hear at the moment. Not the noise outside of the rushing cars. Not the conversations unfolding inside the coffee shop. Not the gentle greetings of the people giving you their sweetest smiles as they tell you how good the morning is. It's the blank spaces of the sheet that caught my eyes. The words borrowed from a person's soul and posted into a substance called paper. What is the real essence of writing? I dare try to investigate this through the eyes of those who have gone before me.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind", I quote from the Brilliant Mr. Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was one of his earliest comedies. Mr. Shakespeare married his beloved Anne Hathaway at the age of 18. They were blessed with 3 children. After his death, majority of his fortune went to his oldest daughter, Susanna. To his wife, he left what biographers identified as his "second best bed". As weird as it may seem, it seemed like an insult, something of no significance. Why a bed? Why not something of more value? But the more I read about that "bed", the more I realized how his romanticism seemed to run deeper in his veins more and more. The bed was a place of comfort, of rest and of peace. Researchers speculated that the bed signifies richness since it was the bed they shared. I tried borrowing Mr. Shakespeare's heart and found that he indeed is a sweet person. He gave this bed to his wife to show her how much he loved her. Till the end he wanted her to see the thing that would remind her of how much he valued their love. Worth more that money or gold, he gave Anne the best gift he could offer anyone, love.
Another author caught my eyes with his romanticism and funny lines for his novel, The Last Song. A line that gave me a nice laugh, "Mom says it's because she has PMS.
Do you even know what that means?
"I'm not a little kid anymore. It means pissed-at- men syndrome."
I asked myself, how in the world is this man able to think about lines like these? A closer look at Mr. Nicholas Spark's life revealed his secret. In his biography, the writer told of how he attempted to work with publishers on his novels and how he tried to get into law school but was rejected. He chose to try different jobs instead, which even included selling dental products over the phone. Funny lines like these enabled me to see through his strength. He was now a well known writer and almost all of his novels are now major motion pictures. I've seen how he can manage to give us a laugh. How his words has been giving us comfort. No matter how hard life turns out to be, there's no reason why we would not smile.
I found myself an hour later still on the same seat. Only this time, the empty spaces on the sheet wasn't as empty as it was anymore. I, myself, am a writer for almost a decade already. Not nearly as amateur as I am ten years ago, but yet I felt as if I have a lifetimes worth of stories I have yet to learn. The stories beneath writers' lives breathe life to their ideas. Every page is the pot in which the stories are immortalized. The writer's life is the soil in which the story is planted. So as I start to munch on the keys of my keyboard again, I begin planting another one in the page of the novel I've been working on ever since I was born, my masterpiece I am living. My-so-called life.