For The Night Ends With Fire, author K.X. Song turns her eye to a strong human emotion and follows where having it leads, and what having it does to those who experience it. Which emotion is it? Read on to discover.
K.X. SONG:
It all started with a journal entry, penned several years before the idea for The Night Ends With Fire came to me: “To want something so badly, even the wanting becomes beautiful. (Inherent.) To be alive is to desire.”
From a young age, I was obsessed with wanting. I wanted to be somewhere I was not. I wanted to be someone I was not. I wanted less of one bad thing and more of another good thing. I was not unique in this regard, of course, but perhaps more than others, I condemned this aspect of myself. Either because of my conservative upbringing, my Chinese roots, or simply because I was a young woman growing up in the 21st century, I saw my desire as evidence of my immorality and tried my hardest to be content with what I already had.
It was a huge change, then, to reframe this core belief of mine—to decide that the act of wanting was not proof of my ingratitude but rather a beautiful and necessary part of myself that had contributed to my various successes in life. In many ways, it was the fervor of my wanting to be a storyteller that led me to publish my first novel at a young age. It was the intensity with which I wanted to run that led me to complete my first marathon. This quality of wanting could lead to unhappiness if coaxed too far, but it could also lead to tremendous happiness…
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Source: The Big Idea: K.X. Song
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