When Writing's Magic

Lately, writing's been that one thing.  It makes everything okay.  Gosh, I pick up a pen and I start to feel better.  It's been that great lately.


How great, you ask?


1 - I've talked about names before.  When I was working on my that short story (that I marked up, but still haven't done any real work on), I was looking through my baby naming book and just wrote down names that I liked.


I found a lot of female names that I liked, but nothing was good enough for my female lead.  Eventually, I found a name.  Hesper.


Yeah, I know, it's not that interesting.  It may even be considered ugly or weird.  But when I saw it, I knew.  I just knew.  That's who she was.  She was a Hesper.  The meaning would eventually suit her story, in hindsight.  Does our subconscious do that or is it just coincidence?


2 - Speaking of a writer's subconscious, when I was actually working on my NaNoWriMo, it made me address some things I'd been struggling with.  I hadn't intended for that to pop up in the story, but it did.  And it's been doing it pretty often.


OR, sometimes I write down a statement (that never makes the computer draft), and then I stop.  Whoa there, girl.  Where did this come from?  Where was this truth to the world and why didn't I know it before and how did it come out this way?  Lacey says it's happened to her too.


3 - This is going to sound really weird from me, since I'm a writer and all, but I don't believe the pen's mightier than the sword.  It cancels out "Sticks and stone may break my bones, but words can never hurt me."  I think it depends on the situation.  No amount of words was going to stop Hitler.  Stones don't snuff a martyr's fire as it does his life.  It makes it burn brighter.


Anyway, the pen pulled through for me last night.  Yeah, I'm surprised too.  I wrote a pledge to myself about writing.  Not that I'd get published.  Not that I'd be the next Lloyd Alexander.  Come to think of it, that didn't enter the piece.  Just some deep crazy girl stuff that I won't go into.


It's my contract with myself.  And I got it in writing.  Today, it came back to bite me in the butt.  I wrote it down.  And somehow I felt like I was bound to the contract.


Funny because I've written things to others before, and some things I never saw through.  Prayers, diary-entries, here on the blog...


So what made this one stick?