Who Decides Who Gets To Write?

Writing can be both selfish, and selfless. It is the fire that melts butter, and at the same time hardens steel. Writing is that perfect cliché for every happy ending; it’s what we expect it to be — but never becomes what we perceive it would be. Writing is the expression, and the depression in everything that we do.

Writing is romantic, but at the same time sly. It lures us into its beauty, captivates us into its tangled magnificence with juxtaposition; it’s everything we wished and admired from afar, in our thoughts and in our books. It is the rationality and the insanity in one cup of coffee. It’s what makes human human even in a context of immortality.

There is no absolute truth as to what writing really is, and what it is all about. No general idea was given beforehand. But as time passes by, we are boxed into stylebooks and time. Deadlines. And maybe soon enough, dead lines.

Platonic, and as overused as ever, the pen really is mightier than the sword since what triggers the sword to spill blood is the pen that ignites, invites, and threatens.

People write for different reasons, agendas, beliefs, and goals. Some want the fame, some just want the mere idea of expression, some just needs to barf all the words out, and some just want to hasten the talent. But regardless of those, people are writing not because we are constrained in boxes — rather, because we know what words are capable of, what these words can do to shape lives, histories, and even things we are not sure can exist.

Writing, and the influence of writing turns people into monsters who want to reach in the enchanted caves we now call the media. The race towards the top isn’t far from the Iron Throne, nor the Capitol. It may not be the reason for you to lose your head, literally. But figuratively, it will be.

We are turning into the people we once hated. The people that couldn’t even appreciate the perfect string of words, the people who are just shallow enough to keep themselves with only 160 characters, or those people who can’t even comprehend ideas within ideas.

We are dictated to manipulate unconscious minds to remain shallow at the risk of these swords forced into our necks. And as we continue to follow whatever is imposed to us, we are forced to believe that in order to let the pen continue to survive, we need to sharpen these swords… These same swords.

Writing is selfish and selfless. And maybe now, it’s not how the fire melts butter and hardens steel. But how the fire continues to forge swords rather than pens.