RX: Writing

This week my intern, Tom Vick, will be heading back to college. It’s been a great summer working with him. I asked him to write one more blog before taking off. Here are some of his thoughts on how writing impacts his life.

From my first journal entry to my current book project, writing has been the best drug for me.
A very addicting drug that causes me to see fictional characters and to speak in a slur of poetic metaphors that leave my friends saying “Whatever, Tom.”

Without a doubt, writing impacts my life. Once you start thinking like a writer one of many things will happen to you:

1. Others will think you are weird for “people watching” and then trying to make up a story about that person.
2. Fictional people become your co-workers.
3. If you have what it takes, people will listen to you, and your writing days in those indie coffee shops will pull readers out of their mundane lives.

When you’re a writer, ideas never leave you alone. There will always be that new character that shows up, the new twist ending you didn’t see coming, and histories of entire worlds so complex you would become a cranky grouch if you didn’t write them down. But writing doesn’t just help me create it helps me process life.

Whenever I have a moral dilemma in life—you know the kind that keeps you up long hours boring a hole into the ceiling above your bed at night—I write that problem down. Then I write every single thought on the page after that problem. Somewhere, if I keep at it, I will find a solution. Or maybe not. But I always make new discoveries about life.

Without this narcotic ink I cannot really think.

One of my worst nightmares is where I get carpal tunnel, all the trees are dead, and the word processors have evolved into humans-harvesting AI with a vendetta for all the times I’ve hit their keyboards. But for now I get to pursue the dream of writing.