I Own It

I always love to hear artists/writers/creators talk about their craft - to hear all the unique ways they describe this magical "thing" of creating something (whether on canvas, on the page, or on a keyboard).

Last week on Oprah, writer Toni Morrison was interviewed and she described her craft, what it does for her:

After all these years, Toni has one more lesson to offer: Everyone needs to have a place that is all theirs. "It's just a place where it's you," she says. "It can be creative, it can be a computer, it can be anything. It's your sacred place and you own it." (source here)

That's my favorite part of the quote - that we "own" our creativity, that sacred place, that world we've created. It's all ours and no one else's. I think if we writers are honest with ourselves, we'd agree that a huge part of the allure of writing is the degree of control we're granted. In real life, we don't have much control -- heck, we can lose just about anything, beyond our control, at the drop of a hat: our keys, our memory, our loved ones, our health, our time, our material possessions, our jobs, and on the list goes...

But when we write, we are in FULL and absolute control. 100%. We determine the fate of every character, every plot outcome, every setting, every word. And that can be oddly liberating. Odd, because in the end, that control is just an illusion, isn't it? I mean, we have control over a world that isn't even real, except in our own minds. Still, though, that sense of control we feel when we write -- that's just as real as the keyboard I'm typing on right now.

It's a power we can own. It's ours alone.