Day 121

Word work is sublime – so is the writing we produce, the measure of our lives?

…

I guess it depends on what you write. Certainly, if you were to ask me if my writing was to a certain extent based on my life experiences, or at the very least, influenced by my life experiences, I’d probably have to say it was.

I mean, what else can you write about? Someone else’s life experiences. Perhaps, if you have a passion for writing other people’s biographies.

Otherwise, what we may see, consciously or unconsciously, is the baring of your soul in your writing.

Of course, if you are a prolific reader and you have an interest in the ways of what the world used to be like, or the particular ways of a certain group of people, this acquired knowledge might also turn up in your work.

As a writer of period romances, or stories that have their setting in days past, a great amount of research might be required to capture the places, the people, and how they behaved or reacted in those days, because not a lot of those old ways are around today.

Back then, they didn’t have mobile phones or any phones at all. They certainly couldn’t;t jump on a plane and be on the other side of the country in a matter of hours, or on the other side of the world in half a day. Travel used to be by ship and took weeks, even months, to get from one side of the world to the other.

Trains were different, run by steam, and took longer to get to destinations; cars were rare and only affordable for the rich, and places like Africa, and the Middle East, even the Orient, were totally different than they are today, and a person who lived in that time would be shocked at how the world had changed particularly since the end of the second world war.

We only know of today, and what life is like now. Some of us know what the world was like 50 years ago, and it was different then, there was still a British Commonwealth, and we still learned about the British Empire and its kings and Queens. America was a different place, but the only way we knew of it;s colourful past was through the movies Hollywood made.

And the diversity that was out there in the world was only brought to us by immigration from all over the world.

So, we are products of out times, our words reflect what we knew, and what we know, and our perception of the world changes with each new generation of writers who entertain us with their vision of our world, the measure of what our lives are now, and not what they once were.

And some would argue that change is not always for the better.