The outsider

Christine Priestly shares her share of another's creativity

Recently I met a fellow writer and was privileged enough to workshop one of her pieces. It was a personal letter about the decay of a creative partnership which was also a relationship. The downfall of one became an emblem for the other. A beautifully melancholy tale, it described her experience sitting outside the creative process of another – a lover, a partner, watching his creation extend and morph beyond them.

What touched me most was her depiction of what it was like to experience the work of a lover and wonder where it came from. Music, art, writing, all comes from a place inside you that no one else can ever know. It is deep and it is raw.

It’s not something I had ever experienced from the other side. I didn’t know the ache of wanting to be inside that part, knowing you never will. Of wondering what your lover felt as they described one character’s love for another, one character’s hate for another. Wondering if they will ever feel a fraction of that for you.

Now I know.

It aches in the worst possible way. As though someone was there, in that part of them, long before you and forever after, someone who stole it for any other.

I’m not jealous like this when I pick a book up off the shelf. Who is that author to me? And with any non-writer, non-artist, I might assume that part simply isn’t there.

But this is different.

Because I know what it’s like to write those words, to create them. I know it’s not creation at all.

And yet because I’m a writer, I know that each piece, each character, is not its own entity, but a part of you. A part that exists both internally and externally. When I write, I write to discover; in a sense I am not a writer, I am a reader. I experience the suspense, the joy, the pain, the emotions, as they fill the page. If someone asks me where a story came from I can’t tell them. Perhaps I write to uncover it myself, as I dig and I dig.

Then I wonder, is it like that for him? Are his words real, or imagined? Perhaps they are cruel manipulation, suckering the reader, with no genuine emotion at all.

And then I realise where the pain comes from. From knowing I will never truly know.

-CP