So Wong it’s write

A snapped pencilI love words and working with words – the enduring nature of this blog stands testament to the desire of the words to escape from my head in some form. Ideas pop into my head quite frequently, so having something to say is not a problem, it’s turning these ideas from a concept into a finished product within a reasonable amount of time that I struggle with.

Take this entry for example. I started writing it more than a year ago, after reading an interview with Stephanie Meyer, the author of the book Twilight. The article spoke about how the catalyst for the first book was her status as a stay-at-home mother, a situation which gave her the freedom to write, and keep writing, as soon as the idea occurred to her in a dream. Oh, to have such luxury! The writing process makes the relationship between time and space so clear: writing with limited time is like trying to act in a limited space – maybe like how a tennis player would feel playing squash. Everything is faster, closer, more intense.

I’m working on a poem, which I hope to finish and publish soon (possibly my next entry here, the rate at which I post…), but my worry is that people will dismiss it as a trifle. They can hate it all they like – deride the subject matter, disagree with the sentiment, criticise the format… that wouldn’t upset me as much as if they thought I had cobbled it together with minimal thought and effort like I might have done on other occasions. This one was a hard slog… each word meticulously chosen, each line painfully scrutinised for both meaning and meter, and each stanza weighed against its neighbours to ensure balance. Despite this, the end result will simply be a single, insignificant mote in the vastness of cyberspace, resulting in neither fame nor fortune.

Hence I salute you, fellow authors and poets.