The Writing Moment
The best part of writing is when he’s so deeply involved with the work in progress that he goes to sleep thinking about it and awakens with it in his mind. Details inundate him in a joyous way. Reading anything, but especially fiction, is challenging. It feels like everything that he reads drives new insights about what to write.
This is also the worst thing about the writing life because all his energy and attention is directed toward his writing. Others find him unable to engage with them, making him appear absent-minded and anti-social. The truth can’t be explained. Only those wholly absorbed by what they do will understand.
The Writing Moment
His fingers dance and skate across the keyboard. He talks with the characters, stares at far scenes until focus is found, laughs at a surprising turn. He turns his head, listening for what’s being said, rolling with the tension. Quarreling with the muses, he devotes fierce time trying to tie the story’s ends together and grasp what’s to happen next, hunting for the button that will make it all make sense.
The he stops, stretching his arms, deeply inhaling, blinking his eyes, working out back kinks, shifting so blood can find a way through his ass, and gawks at the coffee shop around him. He swears it was full before.
Now he writes alone.
Michael Seidel, writer 