Writing Can Help When You Are Down

Everyone has those days when things are tough. I've always turned to books to help me through the hard parts of my life. Sometimes reading and sometimes writing, and lately, listening to them. Getting lost in a story gives your mind and heart the rest it needs to be able to deal with reality when it's time to step back out again. As a writer, I can better appreciate this because I was first a reader. I can remember many times in my teenage life when everything was MAJOR serious that books helped me get through what I had, at the time, imagined to be the worst, worst thing to every happen in my life. Now I know the difference.

We as writers need to remember how important it is to weave stories that readers can totally immerse themselves in to escape the tough times in their lives. They need to be of such believability that a reader will become lost in the story and live the hero or heroine's life from the book, so that when they reach the end, the happy every after ending, they are left with a feeling of peace if only for a moment. Then, just maybe, that reader will be able to draw from that experience that there is still the possibility of a happy every after at the end of their personal journey.

Hope is something we have the ability to provide our readers. It's something we all need in our lives because storybook lives are nearly impossible. If not for hope, how many of us as writers would have given up on becoming published many years before? Hope gives strength to the heart to continue pumping and breath to the soul to continue seeking.

I want to write that book that will hold someone's hand as they walk a dark path. I want to write that book that reappears in someone's life as a joke or important line that they needed in that moment. I want to write the book that can help someone endure one more chemo treatment or hide for a while from the pain they are in. I want to write that book that will empower one woman to do something they've needed to do for a long time.

It might take me a lifetime to do this, but for every book I do finish, I'm one step closer to seeing my goal to fruition. Sometimes we have to take the steps slowly, one at a time, instead of bounding up them like there's no tomorrow. When we rush through it all, we miss the precious things along the way. Life is living the journey, not rushing to the end because there is no going back—ever.

I lost a part of myself today that I can never recover. It was just one piece of me, but there have been so many of those pieces along the way. I shore up my heart and soul with words, hiding my pain and losing myself with them in order to continue on to a new day.

Marla Monroe