Books and The Passionate Reader

Some believe that creativity-the urge to make something beautiful- is the artist’s effort to attain immortality.They see the artist’s struggle as an effort to create art that lives on, survives the artist, and stands the test of time. 

For the writer, once beyond publication, there is the hope that your work will be recognized as having merit, that it will be successful, lead to future books and to financial success. But beyond practical hopes for tangible rewards there are also the writer’s dreams.   

While I struggled for the time to write, the  security to write, the privacy to write, the good health to write, the peace of mind to write, and the courage to write, the long list of conditions that I thought  I must attain before I was able to write, a vision enticed me. 

I jettisoned the list of conditions that must be met, and that gave me an excuse not to write, because that vision urged me forward.  The vision gave me courage and  furnished the hope. It brought the strength needed to work no matter what my situation was. And as I wrote, the vision sustained me during the coldest and darkest of mornings.  

My vision was of a girl, back to me, and slumped down in a large comfortable chair. There she sat, in a quiet corner of the living room. There was a lamp on the table behind her. It lit the book that was open in her hands. There she sat, totally absorbed, impatiently turning the pages, anxious to find out what happened next. 

Suddenly, the quiet is broken, her mother calls, impatiently, from the kitchen, ” Emily, I told you an hour ago to get ready for bed.  You have school tomorrow, now get your nose out of that book and go to bed.”

The girl startles because she has been lost in the story. She scowls, makes a face, and closes the book . For just a moment she pauses and looks around. 

She was lost in the world of the book. For a time, that world was more real to her than the chair she sat in, more real than the room, even more real than her mother in the kitchen, and she needs a moment to acclimatize-before she crosses that magic breach between fantasy and  reality.

For awhile, Emily, the reader, had lived in another time and place, one filled with humor, or with mystery and adventure.  It was a beautiful place; she came back to reality, reluctantly, with a crash.  

Emily, the passionate reader, is what  moved me to write.  I wanted to be the writer who created that compulsion in the reader to keep turning the pages. I wanted to write the exciting stories that made the devoted reader seek out my books . I wanted to write the kind of books that had made me happy and had given me such delightful worlds to escape to when I was a child.     

Writing those books is what drives me, keeps me struggling on, and gives me such joy as a writer, and yes, it makes me hope that I will write a classic, that rare book, so loved that it will be kept alive by the passionate and devoted reader.