and you grab onto it. But it’s only a good line or a concept so you can only feel it on the inside. It’s not completely tangible yet, so you grab onto it and see where it takes you.
So then, this site is my oath to creativity; it's a personal promise to write everyday, to think everyday, and to find that perfect line. For my sanity I hope I never stop writing. I often imagine myself as an old man, writing even though all the ink in the world has run dry. My writing doesn’t need a purpose other than to give me one. I suppose this is dangerous, putting your belief into something that doesn’t need the belief of others. But it is this line I think a lot of writers walk. And it is this existence of contention that produces the best work; blood and ink can come from the same hand.
Maybe I’m being overly poetic.
Be what you create.
-J.K. Lyons
J.K. Lyons is a senior at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. There he studies History and Creative writing. Two of his short stories, "Dreams and Smoke" and "Getting Lucky", have been featured in Black Market Lit, an online literary magazine.
Writing is...
Writing is therapy. Writing is a struggle. Writing is a way of being. I often do my bestwriting, late at night, after having adopted a sense of loss and isolation - the whole brooding, struggling artist thing. Even the more positive things that I write come from a place of tension. When I “go there” to write a different persona washes over me. This persona is heavy. Burdened with the weight of creation and thought. Burdened with choice - what’s good writing and what’s not. This weight pulls at the core until something is forced into the mind and, if I’m lucky, onto a page. And then reward. Wish fulfillment. Sometimes it’s better than drugs or sex, getting something worthwhile onto the page.
I suppose most of the writing I do never really makes it onto a page. Most of the writing I do is in my head. When you can’t sleep is really when you do the best thinking. The thinking is less influenced by outside stimulus. It’s strange what darkness can reveal. What the lack of influence can produce. Just you and your thoughts, firing at random. And then you see something you like