Subject: [FFML] [essay]The Writer's Challenge
From: Elsa Bibat
Date: 10/29/1997, 12:13 PM
To: "'fanfic@fanfic.com'" <fanfic@fanfic.com>

Hell, might as well. .
If you read it and you hate it send your response privately.   

Writing

     I have been writing for a very long time.I started
writing as therapy. Therapy for a sick mind and a 
wounded heart. Something that my doctor would
call a very severe psychological disorder. Let's just
say breaking into tears in the middle of an Arithmetic
class something that normal people don't do.

      I've always had a vivid imagination. Sometimes when
I was still young I would play with the images I saw around
me and in a way magnified their beauty for me. I loved to
read fantasy stories and cartoons. I was probably the only
ten year old to finish the entire Lord of The Rings in three days.
   
     This imagination of mine has been both a help and a 
hindrance for me. The dreams I have hold back the despair
and the pain. The dreams also tend to make me look kinda 
weird.
 
     For example, have you ever met anyone who continually
talked to himself ? Talking to himself in different accents 
and mannerisms ? Constantly having that dreamy look in
his eyes ? That's what happens when I work on my stories.

     Nowadays, I am editor,head writer and publisher of
a small press magazine. I'm head writer since no one seems
to want to write stories for the mag that I constantly bang out 
5-10 original stories every two weeks. I post my fanfics to the 
FFML for fun.        
  
     The way I write is kinda spectacular for some people when they
watch me work. If I work on something, I technically live and breathe 
my work for as long as I work on it. Remember of the part of talking 
to myself continually ? I say the dialogue of my characters. Each inflection,
each accent , I check out vocally. I've had acting experience so it is 
quite easy for me change my voice. Each scene for the story I run  through
my head and sometimes , since I work late so no one can see me,
I act it out in the room. I've been a 19th century gentleman to a peasant
serving maid. 
 
     When I go out while working on a story, I tend to work on it. People
wonder if I'm crazy when they hear me mutter my character's dialogues.
I am technically possesed by my stories so to speak. The reason I write
is still there. To hold back the madness of harsh reality, to keep me safe
behind a veneer of dreams. But now there are other reasons.When people 
read my mag and start to smile, laugh, cry or come up to me and say
' You're doing a good job' or request a particular chapter of the serialized
novel I write in the mag, I feel good. Being a writer , a storyteller the second
oldest occupation on the face of the earth, it makes me feel good.

      Whenever I let the hero get the girl or the lovers finally meet , I am filled
with the sense of being a creator. I weave a place faraway for the people
who read my stories. I tell them wonderful stories. I create a place of wonder
and enchantment and sometimes I paint a picture of Reality, to help them 
deal with it. But my greatest reward when I write is when a liitle child,
someone who used to be me, is given a chance to let his imagination soar
with mine. To give him a chance to escape the pressures of school,bullies
and sometimes parents. When I'm tired of telling stories, I look at some
of the people whom I was able to touch. Their smiles make me smile too.
Then I draw up the seat up towards the keyboard , put in a tape in the 
stereo, Enya's ' The Memory of Trees', then I let mind soar to the worlds
that I love.       

    
---------------------------------------------------------

' All there is to good writing is putting down on paper words which dance
and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles'
                                                                          - Gertrude Stein  
' Writers are the torchbearers of civilization. We're set in a corner only we
can illuminate.Some of us are searchlights, able to cast a beam into the 
far reaches of the human soul.Some of us are candles , barely able to 
sustain a glow against the darkness. Nevertheless the words I write 
are important, because light is additive. Another's light  doesn't diminish
 my own. Our lights together make us stronger.'   
                   - (After much paraphrasing and reaaranging) Roger Martin