All Comments on 'My Secret Life'

Not sure how this brilliant analysis of genius at work, can be applied to Literotica. Much less myself!

I work alone, except for the entire Internet where I gather details, images, scenes, behaviors to add to the pot and stir. I guess as a community we need to share our highest ambitions for ourselves?

My education is nowhere near those described in this illuminating post! Nor that of yowser (the sword? as in, the pen is mightier than...:)

Just a rural upbringing, which in itself lends something to scene and situation foreign to 80% of people. Then add, my childhood home was truly rural, not even a village nor small town, just a farmhouse a mile from the nearest neighbor. My daily concerns were equipment repair, gardening (so we had something to eat), animal husbandry. And reading.

Thus my interest in writing. What saved me, fed me, entertained me, instructed me those nearly two-score years became an enduring interest. Now in the latter part of my existence, I turn myself to adding something to all that.

Because much was gained, much is owed. Whatever I can do, I have to do.

Not as in the writers' forums (fora?), not for score or points or comments. That's a matter of which audience found the work, and whether it agreed to them. I write to better myself, to gauge myself against my previous works (discernable improvement!) and to how I view my own written landscapes, characters, scenes.

Recently I wrote an epilogue to a series, of nearly 200 thousand words on the same small community, the same characters dedicated to their own community improvement, more than a year of struggle to me. Three short scenes of their further lives decades hence, and ultimately of their ending.

But not the ending of their communities! Families! Those live on, impressed and formed and fostered by the individuals I wrote about in ways I struggled to express adequately.

To see my people, my characters have a lasting effect, to send waves of simple inspiration or modes of contentment or sense of humor, revealed in a turn of phrase, a family story, a way of dealing with trouble. Ripples running imagined generations, decades, a century! I admit I shed some tears, had to stop and start, could not read what I wrote without feeling melancholy, existential dread, pride. I bawled more than once, had to write through the tears.

That's why I write. To express something meaningful, to myself and maybe, with some luck, to anybody else. I put it here because I have to put it somewhere and here I find writers dedicated to writing so maybe I fit in.

Anyway, thanks for showing us what we could be doing! So much more than we remember to do most days. I'll try to do better.

Numerous salient points you raise! My impression based on writing a whopping two whole submissions (both bits of fluff really), is the extraordinary difficulty I experienced in their preparation. Struggling to overcome that and pulling things together to make a more or less readable story was surprisingly gratifying. No choice but onward I suppose. Thank you for your insightful essay.

Some years ago I had glanced through Nabokov’s “Ada”, and was not impressed by his writing: it is too convoluted, and many of his “details” are unnecessary; nor did I like his famed “Lolita”, but in the afterword to the English edition of the novel he says this: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss”, and I completely agree with him on this: all that matters in belles-lettres is the “aesthetic bliss” which is sorely missing from anything I have read so far on Literotica.

Vittorio Vittorossi