FANTASY

5: the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need; also : a mental image or a series of mental images (as a daydream) so created

I'm reading a book right now by Elizabeth Berg about "the art of writing true." Each chapter contains practical advice on how to be a writer and how to practice the art of writing. Each chapter also contains homework, which honestly scared me a bit at first! The opening chapter is Berg telling her story and the initial homework assignment is to imagine your life as a writer - where you want to write, what you want to write, why you want to write, etc.

I actually found the exercise of fantasizing about what it would be like to be a writer remarkably easy. I can picture just where I'd like to sit to write, what I would want my days to look like and how I would manage both writing and my responsibilities to my family. But probably the easiest part of the homework assignment was why I want to write. I want to write because I want to make people think. The best thing about any good book is that it makes me think. I really believe that "The unexamined life is not worth living" and books are the mirror I hold up to my life, my heart and my soul to see if I am living as I want to, as I should and as I could.

It's interesting that the definition above relates fantasy to a phsychological need because I definitely feel a need to write. Not because I have any great wisdom to share but because it helps me process my own life and because it releases the words that I feel pressing down on my chest. After getting the words out of me and in to sentences, I experience relief at setting the words free. Now if I can just move from fantasizing to actually living life as a writer, that will be progress, indeed.