A Heart's Inferno: The Writing Process

Fire. A hot blazing inferno that serves to engulf one’s world. Drawn in by the inviting warmth, spurned by the scorching coals. It is oh-so-easy to forgo the pain in order to stay in the light. Many are pulled to people and places which they know burn bright. However, that light often serves to blind the naive and unguarded, luring them into a false sense of comfort until it is too late to pull away. By the time they register the pain, the 3rd-degree burns have made their way to the heart. As many can impart, a wound of the heart is often the hardest to heal.

My main inspiration for this piece stemmed from the idea of a beetle on a lamp. Much like my post two weeks ago, I took motivation from the note card activity and managed to write a piece surrounding the idea of being drawn to the light only to get burned. Since I have already discussed more of my inspirations in the aforementioned post, here, I will detail the process for which I came to write this piece.

I started by free-writing for 5 minutes about anything I could think of surrounding the central word “fire.” Afterward, I rearranged those ideas and strung them together in a way that flowed easier and was more appealing to readers. In the background, I used sounds from the website Noisli, one of the writing tools we learned about this week, and then I got to work rewriting and revising until I was somewhat satisfied with the result. After that, the only thing I had left to do, was to go in and nitpick the final details and check for grammatical and spelling errors.