This is such a great piece!!! It is part of an article written by Dorthe Nors. Solitude can be such a dangerous and frightening thing--yet for a writer that's exactly what's necessary to churn out some great material. I like to write, but I'd certainly term myself an amateur in the art. But at the same time, I understand that dangerous necessity of solitude in order to write. To write, one needs peace and quiet. With peace and quiet comes the awakening of thoughts, memories, deep passions and awful vices. To be able to channel all these immensely overpowering emotions is to be a most masterful writer. If you do not put a piece of yourself into your writing, your writing is dead. There is a therapeutic emptying of oneself in writing. Sometimes after I've written a piece that's been eating at me for days, I am completely spent. I am satisfied that my restless and highly charged thoughts have been released, leaving me, at last, in peace. Anyways, I will let be silent and let a literary expert expound on this amazing and inexhaustible topic.
"Solitude, I think, heightens artistic receptivity in a way that can be challenging and painful. When you sit there, alone and working, you get thrown back on yourself. Your life and your emotions, what you think and what you feel, are constantly being thrown back on you. And then the “too much humanity” feeling is even stronger: you can't run away from yourself. You can't run away from your emotions and your memory and the material you're working on. Artistic solitude is a decision to turn and face these feelings, to sit with them for long periods of time.
It takes the courage to be there. You run into your own pettiness. Your own cowardice. You run into all kinds of ugly sides of yourself. But the things that you've experienced in your life become the writing that you do. And there's no easy way to get to it, if you want to write literary fiction.
And that's what Bergman and other Swedish writers have taught me—to stay in that painful zone, discipline myself through it to get where I want.
It’s very hard because I'm a social kind of person. I like talking to people and having fun. But you have to divide your life up. I enjoy the zone I get in when I’m courageous enough to stay with my solitude for awhile. That’s when the really good stuff comes. But the solitude of being a writer should have a warning label on it.
It’s sitting with challenging emotion—the process itself can be so difficult. Sometimes it’s hard to move on. But if I'm bored by what I'm writing, I'm pretty sure that other people will be bored by it. But sometimes you have to push yourself through all this stuff that doesn't work, because by the end of that you might get somewhere new and worthwhile. That's the hard part—pushing through the bad.
I try to remember that I’m writing all the time—even when I’m not writing. You pick up on things every moment; you’re always having the radar out. You're always examining things, storing things. But when writers don't write for too long—they become more and more annoyed, and then they become an annoying person to be around. Suddenly there's this itch—a physical itch, like you're having the flu or something. You need to push the toothpaste out."
