It’s a rough time, lately, being a creative.
Maybe it always has been, I dunno. The artists, writers, musicians, dancers— the sensitives, the ones who throw their hearts into everything they do—always seem to be the ones who feel the ache of the world the most poignantly. And let’s face it, these days there’s plenty of ache to go around.
Partly we create to process that pain, and to let others who see or hear our work know they’re not alone in what they feel. My long-time writing partner, Cly Boehs (we’ve been a team for twenty years!) calls it “writing as therapy.” Certainly I throw a lot of my own hurts into my stories. The despair Duncan Kyle feels when he realizes he may never see his home again in Sephirot, the deep regret at lost opportunities for connection Leandre Naquin understands only too late in The Communion of Shadows, the grief and loss Marig Kastella has to deal with when his life changes irrevocably in The Chains of Orion—all of these are emotions I’ve experienced, and (I’m
guessing) so have a great many people. By bleeding them out onto the page, I hope to have given voice to some of the collective joys and sorrows that are all part of being human.
It’s why it breaks my heart when I hear someone say, “What I have to say doesn’t matter,” or
“others have said it/done it/performed it better, so why should I bother?” It is in a hurting world
like the one we’re all in that we desperately need every single creative person— the ones who so
eloquently show us both the triumph and the tragedy, who hold it all up for us to see and say,
“It’s still so beautiful, isn’t it?”
The loveliest part is that each of us does this a little differently. No one says what you will say,
creates what you will create. We need every single voice there is—not singing in unison, but
singing in all the infinite harmony of creativity humanity is capable of.
And, my friend, that means you.
I’ll end with a quote from the inimitable Neil Gaiman, who has long been one of my deepest
inspirations: “The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice. Your mind.
Your story. Your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance as only you can.”
