Writing and Egolessness

Posted by Anjuelle Floyd | Filed under Articles and Essays, Musings

Crafting stories is the perfect opportunity, offers a wonderful experience, to practice egolessness.

The words our characters speak, our prose that describes their actions and feelings are but soldiers in the army of our thoughts.

How fleeting.

Yet it is with great seriousness that we set about to establish our characters and craft the context of the stories in which their lives are embedded. Without this one-pointedness and seriousness we would draw no readers.

To the degree that we respect our craft so too will readers.

And yet while human individuals do not live upon bread alone, the world could and would go on without our stories.

What to do?

The dilemma of every writer lay upon the double-edged sword of ego–the fact of our existence set upon the great knowledge of our insignificance.

ChögyamTrungpa Rinpoche wrote that, “The great hoax is set upon the solidity of I and other.” The Myth of Freedom

For the writer the question then becomes how separate are we from our characters?

Are the two one in the same, our characters allowing us to try on various garments of life experience and therefore exhausting karma?

And if so what is real and unreal?

Where does our imagination end and we begin?

Is there a place where it all stops? Or is it an endless cycle?

Everything we write is autobiographical.

And yet for our stories, to be truly entertaining, and thoughtful, we as writers must expand ourselves, reach out and exhaust, almost destroy who we thought we were and are.

We are remade within each story we write.

Perhaps this is why so few who carry the embryos of stories write and refine them into existence.

The setting about to of the fiction writer to craft her or his story is our feeble effort to grow and evolve through the lives of our characters.

Yet to craft a memorable story, the novel at some point must write, or more aptly, re-write, re-fashion us.

We are our stories’ first targets for transformation. Our major and supporting characters change as we are altered in the course of writing our protagonist’s story.

Acknowledging this is the initial step towards shedding our armor, the senseless illusion that I and me exist separate from the world and others.

Life and living for the writer offers a continuous thread of substrata upon which to craft stories.

The spectrum of human interactions is our playground. Being in the world, like writing stories stretches us. The more we are in the world the more we are propelled back into solitude where we perform the solitary art of writing.

This is the cycle of the writing life. Anything less is but ambition embedded in ego.

How much change takes place in the stories that you write?

How taxing is it for you to write?