Overbury Ink

New words from Ian LeWinter – the writer behind Blank Must Die

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.  ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”, is what E.L. Doctorow thought. And last, but not least, Isaac Asimov said, “If my doctor told me I only had six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”

Those expressions in their sum total, yet not completely, speak volumes to this gift, curse, burden that you and I share in the written word. Sometimes writing feels like bleeding. Sometimes you can’t type fast enough, you can’t make your brain and your fingers work in perfect harmony getting the thoughts and ideas in your head down in real-time. And sometimes the realness of the world in your head easily competes with your perceptions of the one you live in.s

Often when reading the words of others on our human history, writers become filled with a fire for comment, for their own pronouncement on the ills of mankind. And in these observations and reflections they are oft to regale a specific ill with a torrent of thunderous consternation in sentence, paragraph, and page. Combine a desire to regale with a need to admonish, defend, protect, and remember. Stir in healthy portions of a number of psychopathies. Grind up and add slow, uncontrollable burning desire (when asked why he wrote horror, the writer said, “What makes you think I have a choice.”). Let it all simmer for about 50 years and when you take off the lid you’ll have a look at the mind of a writer. Let me apologize for all of us in advance.

I once made a t-shirt that said, “Writing. The healthy alternative to killing.” I made that t-shirt because I like that statement. I like that the shirt offers my tongue-in-cheek introspection into an exaggerated true feeling. And it is a true feeling, albeit hyperbolic, for me. It brings to fine point a truth in this matter; that in the spectrum of “things that can be done”, while a word and a gun might have the same effect, locution is a stave against incarceration. The fact that I’m a pacifist also makes the gun part rather iffy.

So how does this happen?

For me, the beginning is always observation and interpretation. I see (hear, smell, taste, feel) things, and I think about those things, and I develop opinions (projections) about the things I think about. Some of those judgments and beliefs are all tied up into my ideals, the ones I’m most passionate about, and I feel compelled to put them out there, like I have no choice. (to be continued).