Young Writers

They stay awake in all night diners, drinking coffee from chipped, white mugs, swapping characterizations and sharing plots. They offer each other critiques and praise, and laugh and laugh when they become too serious. They talk about words they hate (“posse,” “moist,” “doily”) and vow to never utilize overused descriptions (“his eyes pierced her as her heart fluttered,” “her hair tumbled in soft, angelic curls”). They don’t worry that they may never get published, that maybe no one will like their stories, because talking about their books is a reward in itself.

He gets up at 4 a.m. to jot down half-formed ideas and thoughts that have only tenuous meaning. Some words sound undeniably appealing when strung together (“velvet insinuation,” “budding sanguine,” “shells of suicide ghosts”) , and it would be the worst shame to not write them on unlined paper.

It’s 11:52 p.m., and she’s awake, writing, because an imagination drunk with cheap tequila offers endless inspiration. Especially when alone in the dark.

They listen to “Forever Young” on repeat, sip coffee, and chat about the limitations imposed by punctuation. About how they want to use more semicolons but have exceeded their quota, and how comma splices are always lurking around the turn of the next rice paper page, and the escape free verse poetry offers with a gracious beckoning.

He taps his pen with mild impatience because he needs a word similar to “desperate,” but doesn’t feel like scrounging for a thesaurus.

She listens to hard music and looks at pictures of flashy rockstars. She finds a song for each of her characters and collects photos of what they look like. Images and sounds both make her synapses fire to the ends of her fingertips that tap urgently at the keyboard as she tries with quiet desperation to nab each vision before it fades and falls beyond her reach. She tries to collect the decadence, grit, and charisma that is Ace of Jokers, or the naiveté and fragile sweetness of Emily.

They express youthful confidence and authority in their writing over coffee. They KNOW their characters as if they were tangible. They KNOW the plot as if it was their own life. They KNOW the setting as if held in its tight embrace. They can’t be unsure when convincing readers of their imperial knowledge of their own story. To do so would be writer’s kamikaze. But these two stand on their own feet, backs straight, and say with clarity, “This is how it is.”

He is an endless optimist…except when he’s in writing mode. The world a writer creates and those who are found therein are flawed. He becomes a cynic in order to view a broken world with enough detachment in order to give it written life. The worst case scenario will happen, and he’s the one to orchestrate it.

She digs into her past, no matter how much it scares her sometimes, and draws up bad memories like still, stagnant water from a half-remembered well. She drinks the memories, even though she knows they’re poison. She knows she should let the past stay buried in that enclosing, suffocating shaft, and that she’s infecting her present with dark things that she should just put behind her. But if remembering helps her to let go, then she’ll continue holding the tears back as she catalogues her life through an artificial vessel.

They comment, over yet more coffee, on how ridiculous the idea of the Muse is. The Muse does not sweep them away on a flurry of sparkly wings. The Muse does not capture their minds, force their hands to the page and spew forth well-wrote literature. The Muse, with most certainty, does not control their characters. THEY control their characters. THEY play with them like posable marionettes. Why? Because they are THEIRS. They will MAKE the two androgynous assassins indulge in each other, or bring down the Four Kings from their crumbling towers, or force the pale, inhuman creature from its shelter in the Woods all in the name of creative experimentation.

These young writers are mostly carefree. Coffee is their gasoline, ramen and rice an incentive to get up in the morning, and dessert from that all-night diner is like sacred manna. They’re in college for things entirely unrelated to writing, because they don’t want to be told what they’re doing wrong. Because their writing is perfect to them. Writing is special for them, and to make it a career could mean coming to hate it. So while getting Architecture and Accounting degrees, they will work part-time jobs and scrape enough together to make rent and buy more coffee and feel glamorous while doing so.