Well not always anyway.

A writer doesn’t always write about how they feel or about how they think or view the world, not exactly. Writing isn’t always an open letter to one’s soul. Sometimes it’s less than that: Just a fun way of escaping daily thinking and routine. Or more than that, like a profound analysis of one’s psychology, moods and soul. But other times it’s something different, something that isn’t exactly them (or me or you), something that fills us, that passes through us, that uses us as a means of reaching others.

Sometimes, for a writer, writing is a vessel for foreign emotions. Fabricated emotions, borrowed emotions, emotions that are empathized… Emotions that aren’t ours, that do not belong to us but that we feel anyways. A writer acts a bit like a channel for these emotions.

I am not sad or happy, I don’t feel trapped or wings grow just because I write so. Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t. Perhaps a bit of both. Perhaps not. Writing is a mash of a lot of things and a bit of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff that we don’t always understand or think or feel but that we put into words anyways because it seems the moment to do so.

Writing is something you do to express yourself but not necessarily to express your self. This is something important that I have learned by participating in writing classes: never consider the protagonist of a story (or the subject or theme of a story) as the writer themselves. Try to think of it more like a mirror, a projection, something the writer decided to write about and that is dear to them, holds meaning, but doesn’t define them. The point of view of a character in a story is not the point of view of the author, so it is not to be refered as so.

True, as an author your ideas, thoughts and opinions often end up in your characters but that doesn’t mean that everything the story expresses is what the author wants to express or tries to convey. Sometimes, when writing, one even conveys things they didn’t even want to convey. Art is made to make people feel, think and reflect. Sometimes it expresses ideas but always remember, art and artists are a very clearly separate duo, even if they are completely fused together.

This was just a small rant to try to clarify this for all of humanity. Here’s the tl;dr you have to learn from this: ‘I am not what I write. Mostly.’. Maybe it sounds stupid, unnecessary or incomprehensible (I apologize if it does) but I felt it was something important to say and I wanted to express it.

Thank you for reading and understanding.