Posted on September 5, 2024

I learned how to write at this time. This is when you become a writer. In the wee hours. The brain needs out of the head. Sometimes it’s the plague of a worry that refuses to die in slumber. Sometimes it’s the rush of an idea that required a subconscious requiem to bring it into being. For me, it was the impending death of a deadline. I became a writer while surviving 5,000 miniature deaths by deadline. A digital note on my phone, half-thoughts collected on my fingers while being jolted around by surrounding bodies beneath the strobe lights of a club or a venue, fine-tuned in an Uber en route to this chair, this desk, and a blank page, praying that all the verbal hullabaloo would make sense when the time came to press “send”.

A writer is a diamond that requires pressure, more pressure, even more pressure over the course of years, decades, a lifetime. I don’t believe great writing comes to those who don’t feel the crushing impending suffocation of time running out, of an editor’s ruffled brow, of a judgmental reader, of words that are trapped in the throat, willing you to swallow them, but – fuck no – the truth cannot sit in the gut or else you become sick. I don’t believe great writing comes to those who haven’t vomited every honest feeling and idea at their surrounding world despite the enormous vulnerability of exposure, despite the risk that it would further alienate them at their desk at 3am. I don’t believe great writing comes to those who don’t know how to play out a scene in private without wondering endlessly whether it would be so bad to share every intimate detail out loud and remember it that way, forever. Without these little masochistic edges, you may as well be writing grocery lists, or teaching law. To write is to live with a pen behind your ear, ready to attack every moment.

I own my words, and my words own me. Which way around is it, I wonder at times. Who is the driver? Writing is something to do at 3am when the business of the world has evaporated from the streets and the train stations and the bus stops, and taken up residence in my head instead. It is so loud in here. And the words are such powerful little things. A few letters. A slew of sentences. A couple of paragraphs. Can change a life. Can break a pattern. Can inspire a movement. Can open a heart. Can murder a love. Can catch a fire. Can wake a soul.

I write because one day I would like to be a great writer. It’s a good reason to be awake at 3am as society plots its own suicide. Whatever unfolds, it’s a fucking great story.

Thank you. For reading me, while I figure it out.

[Read more of Eve Barlow’s essays at https://substack.com/@evebarlow1]