Every morning, I wake up and stare at my bedroom wall, where two things that couldn't be more different stare back at me. On my left is the most majestic portrait of Astarion from Baldur's Gate 3 that a few friends gifted me for my birthday last year. On my right is a poster from the fan screening of Tatsuki Fujimoto's Look Back. And two thoughts flit through my head at once.
One, that there is no sweeter relief than being loved to the point of understanding. Two, that you cannot separate the pursuit of quality from the far more difficult and largely thankless pursuit of quantity.
I have written almost 50K words in the two weeks since I stepped out of the theatre for Look Back. Maybe even more, if you count the words lost in my backspace button and Google Docs history. Not all of these words were good, most of them were mediocre. I have enough of a writer's ego to say that none of it was bad. But all of it was practice.
Creativity has taken on a different form for me lately. I used to sit and wait for the proverbial lightning bolt of inspiration to strike, prick up my ears for the swell of ethereal music as Apollo descended from the heavens to plant a big, fat kiss on my shining forehead. These days I feel more like Hephaestus, hammering away at my forge creating weapons that may never get used.
There is nothing glamorous about the process of creation. And so we make art that romanticises making art so that we can remind ourselves why we continue to torture ourselves. I wonder if that's what went through Fujimoto's mind when he wrote Look Back, or whether that interpretation only exists in my mind as a viewer. Either way, my brain must be some kinds of messed up to see the stacks of sketchbooks lining the hallway to Kyomoto's room and think "I should really get back into writing" instead of "mayday, mayday! abort, abort!"
There is something inherently self-sacrificing about making art, or at least that's what I believe. If you're not sacrificing your body to sleepless nights (because you're a fully functioning human being with boundaries, congratulations to you), then you're sacrificing your soul, your wit, your memories; all to breathe life into pages, make blood flow through the veins of sentences that people may not even read.
If you asked me why I keep coming back to writing, I don't think I could even tell you. Except, maybe, it is a pursuit to be understood. It is a human desire as old as time. It is the foundation of language. It is wanting to be loved enough that your friends would buy an embarrassingly large portrait of a fictional elf-vampire for you to hang on your bedroom wall.
And I suppose that is romantic, in a way.
You can read my no spoiler review of Look Back here.