Ampersand: The Writer's Broken Infinity

The ampersand.
It's a symbol I have recently come to like very much.
A large part of my daily writing life revolves around symbolism. Honestly, symbolism is what holds our fictitious worlds together.

We are creators.
We are makers.
We have come up with some of the coolest things this world will ever see.
We have given life to death, and death to life.
We have played a mini god in this world of fiction.
We have created kingdoms,
made people come to life,
given a name to that otherwise nameless little island.
We have explored worlds and planets...
Writers are more than just poets who rhyme in this dark, dark little world we live in.
We are people who give infinity
and we are the people who break that infinity.
But we are the ones who will always add that AND. We are a soulful group of people who will never give up, who will never stop until that white paper has these black smudges on it.
Perhaps none of it will ever make sense. Perhaps we can't ever explain what's inside our minds. We may never get our message out there into the open. But we created. We imagined and we made. We have given love and have taken away love. We create pain and take it away.

But it all comes to an end.

It all eventually just stops. We hit that last period and the novel is over. Maybe you actually write the words "the end" to solidify it inside yourself. "The End" is never for the readers, it's for the writers. The little infinity we just created -- that one you spent years developing -- has just come to an end. It has just broken.

And maybe that's the hardest part about being creatives. We have to eventually except the idea that even though we have added all the "and's" we could have ever added, it has to stop.

Thus, the writer's broken infinity.

Maybe none of the above post makes sense. Perhaps not every writer believes their story has to come to an end eventually. Creatives seem to always walk on broken glass... Those shards are the infinities that didn't last forever. The characters that had to die, the worlds that had to implode, the stars that didn't stay in the sky. That's what we as writers do.

What's your writing broken infinity? Do you have a hard time ending your characters' stories? Do you walk on the broken shards of the broken worlds you created? I'd love to chat. Leave a comment and share your thoughts. 



Coming up in January...
New Year: Clean Slate
Ampersand: The World's Broken Infinity
Stereotypical Villains and Broken Antagonist 
Wanderlust Soul: The Importance of Having Dreams