“Writing is a grave undertaking. There is a funeral in every word.” Hudson Bridge told me one Sunday afternoon in June. The sky was that clear blue that makes it hard to believe it’s real and not a page out of a novel. “What do you mean by that?” I asked. His answer was rather long.
“We writers are creators.” Hudson began. “We create worlds and breathe life into all we inhabit them with. We are the words of our characters, we cause them to walk into peril, raise them up with humble tears to become heroes, give them love and allow them to feel the raging of death. We hold all they are going to do and say within the realm of our imagination. It is our responsibility not to make their lives seem artificial or meaningless. We must, as creators, believe our characters are physically real and the world we create for them exist. If we do not, how do we expect the reader to believe? We have the grave responsibility to bury our dead, have the reader attend the funeral, and feel the loss. We must feel the tears first if we expect the reader to. As creators we desire the readers to laugh and cry along with our characters. We want them to feel fear as our characters take each step down the stairs to the cellar of misery. Our desire, or at least it should be our desire, is to have the reader feel the cobwebs that hang from the shadows on their face as they descend those stairs. We must make the reader smell the dry heat of an attic full of memories, feel cold of a crisp winter’s day, the rebirth of an eternal spring, and the carefree days of summers by the lake. Each line we write is to draw the reader deeper into the story, make them a part of it, convince the reader that the words they are reading are truth. The blank page is the universe in which we create our worlds. We must bleed ink on every page.”
I have held this close to my pen every time I pick it up to write. Hudson Bridge’s words live within every letter I scribble on the empty page. As a reader I expect reality in every book I pick up. As a writer? I will let my readers be the judge. One thing I do know is, we do not want our characters to die with the closing of a book, no, more than anything we want our characters to live on long after the story is over.
A Collection of Twisted Things 