Writing is a lot like giving blood.
It’s like that moment when you roll up your sleeve in a blood bank, exposing flesh to a nurse’s needle. What happens next is you bleed, but it’s a controlled loss of life-giving fluid. You neither give it all away at once nor complain at the sight of red cells exiting your body.
Everything about your loss and subsequent transfer of fluid is purposeful – helping people you’ll never meet.
The export of blood is controlled, captured, intended. Every cell is bottled and preserved.
The cost to you, as the giver, is incalculable. It is donated, more like, sacrificed with no chance or desire of profit. Yielding blood and writing words is a gift from two parts of the same arm.
Writers ‘donate’ their words
The telling of truth, the giving of words, is as powerful as if the transfusion were happening in real time — donor and recipient side-by-side. Like a book with chapters, each container identifies the giver’s name, and the day of the donor’s first breath.
Most critical, though, is the type of blood being given. For some, it’s O Positive, others ‘Negative’. Your type can determine the compatibility: Fiction, non-fiction, biographical, fantasy.
Once given, words – like blood – will intermingle within a distant recipient, becoming the domain and fabric of that person, built on, copying itself to preserve and strengthen the host.
That’s when blood cells, like words, do their best work: Unseen.
✒️
Postscript: That Hemingway quote about blood
There has been a long tradition of ascribing a quote to Ernest Hemingway along the lines of:
‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’1
In truth, a more reliable source of the idea is ascribed to Paul Gallico:
‘It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.’2
This is the first in a series of prose, poetry and essays about writing. Stay in touch by subscribing to my newsletter.
Paul Gallagher is an Australian-based published author (Penguin Random House), faithfully wheeling forward with Multiple Sclerosis; a blessed husband, Dad, Granda.
Paul, S. (2016, May 27). Quotation Controversy – Writing and Bleeding. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/quotation-controversy-writing-and-bleeding
Quoted from O'Toole, G. (2013, February 9). Writing Is Easy; You Just Open a Vein and Bleed. Quote Investigator® Tracing Quotations. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/14/writing-bleed/#r+2735+1+1