Writers As Alchemists: Spinning Trauma into Literary Gold
What even are “mere” words anyway?
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They say writers are a culmination of all they have consumed. They eat the words and the sounds and they distort their mouths into the shapes of the words they write. All writers scrape the insides of their ribs to scratch their chaos into order. Then they put it out into the world, hands cupped over their barest vulnerabilities. They wrap them up in little boxes to make them look more palatable. They say, “Eat this; know me.”
I wonder what it would be like to share a thing I could look at, head cocked to one side in a sort of wondering way, and think, “Oh, so that’s why I write.” I wonder even more what it would be like to have someone else come along and look at it with me, and say, “Oh, so you are a writer.”
I think of hands stained with ink, cramping under candlelight. It makes me marvel at how, with funny-shaped black marks on paper, my own small hands made worlds and people and creatures. I wonder if it might be a sort of blasphemy that I brought them all to life with mere words.
(What even are “mere” words anyway?)
Anyone who says words can’t change anything has never felt the glimmer that snuck under ribcages and settled there, thumping away like another heartbeat, has never imagined near-invisible doors that open to a forgotten magical realm, where Deeper Magic brings dead things back to life, where little people find courage and bat away coming darkness by merely setting one foot before the other, has never felt a fire scorching their insides and wanted to use that flame to blaze a new path and carve out a new world.
I mean, the Shadow may be a passing thing, but it is still all too present and real.
So we scribble away. And on and on and on.
I want to write about the light in between the cracks nobody sees or thinks to look at, to trail my fingers across my scars and parcel them up with gold. It’s my tiny way of lifting them from obscurity into the world and saying, “You tried but didn’t silence me. Here I am.”
Writers mine their trauma and market it for sale to the masses. It’s not a pretty way of looking at it, but if we don’t write the darkness, how will we find the light? Because I write to discover who I am; I’m certain many of us do that: write for the hope of making sense of those jagged pieces they can’t bear to look at. We put it out into the world hoping someone will see and tell us, “You too? I thought I was alone.”
And so the writer’s alchemy persists—the continuous transformation of base elements into something resplendent. We take the broken shards of our lives, the ragged edges that threaten to slice us to pieces, and submit them to a refiner’s fire stoked by an unrelenting compulsion to make sense from it.
Out of the crucible emerge ingots of words, still malleable, which we can work with our fingers into delicate filigrees of meaning. What results is a glittering facade that both obscures and illuminates—the polished end-product belying the imperfect core from which it originated. Not unlike rubies born of immense heat and pressure, or pearls nursed by restless grains of sand. And in that product lies the writer’s magic: imbuing the damaged and the beautiful alike with their own luminous worth. The power not only to endure one’s demons, but to bottle them up and reshape them into something that glows.
For at the heart of every writer’s motivation lies the yearning—to infiltrate humanity’s darkness with their hard-won light.
Brilliant 👏🏽