The Only Thing that is Real

Fishy Corona,
Photo by olivander.

The act of writing is the beginning; it does not matter if the writing is good. You first write from the heart, and then edit with the brain. You write without rereading, you write without thinking of the fantasy of your team of editors, your publicist, the public readings, the interviews attempting to pierce the veil of your brilliance. Forget the invitations to read at colleges and the likelihood that these very words will be the ones to seduce some young college thing into bed with you. None of that matters, none of that is real. The only thing that is real is this moment, this sublime isolation in which you can uncover emotions you didn’t know you had, recreate a sensation from the past with just the right words, then twist the truth into a shape perhaps more real than the one you had to begin with.