Inciting Inspiration

I watched a special the other night on J.K. Rowling and found her story incredibly inspirational. Listening to her talk about creating Harry Potter made me want to develop my little seedling ideas. Unfortunately, as soon as the program ended, so did my inspiration. And every time I go walking, I’m inspired to write poetry. All these thoughts and lines flow through my head until I’m done walking. I stretch my legs, wash my face and don’t feel like picking up a pen to write down all the things I thought about. And then they slip away. And just the other day, I was looking up information on literary agencies and it once again brought up that desire to get cracking on my memoir, an idea I’ve been sitting on for close to two years now. It’s quite ridiculous and I even gave myself a deadline on writing that thing. I think I said if I hadn’t started writing it sometime last year, I would just forget it. I mean, it must not be that important to me if I can’t get my crap together and sit down and write it.

I guess I just feel like my mind is too cluttered. That’s why when I write, I tend to write about things that are pressing on my mind at the moment. The basic content of my memoir has already been written down. It’s just a matter of punching it up, editing and polishing it to a pearly shine. The only problem is the details I want to inject have not been written down and as each day passes, those little nuggets that tie each story together are disappearing from my memory. It’s crucial that I get started right away and yet I can’t seem to get started. And I keep saying once I clear my head, once I get all these other thoughts out of the way, then I can concentrate on writing. Sadly, there are some thoughts that I’ve been holding onto longer than the idea of the memoir. I can’t just sit down and write. I have to be inspired. I have to feel it. I can’t force anything. If I start an essay or a poem and I’m not feeling it anymore, I rarely force myself to finish. I just hang on to it until it feels right, until finishing it feels good and natural. I just don’t know when something is going to feel right Actually, I’m a slave to my writing, to my brain. I can’t make it work for me. I work for it. If only I could turn the tables, if only I could clear my mind and focus on one subject at a time, if only I could split up my writing between working a bit on my memoir and working a bit on current thoughts. I guess I need to work at getting my mind right as much as I need to work on that memoir.

And although I said I would forget it if I hadn’t started it at some point, I just can’t let it go. The time I want to write about was a very troubling time for me and I truly feel like writing about it will bring some kind of peace and maybe a little closure. I feel that way with anything else I write and so this should be no different. And although I’m not as bothered by the happenings now as I was then, there are still some situations that I question, circumstances that I regret and times that make me shudder. That’s the stuff that needs to be written, even if no one else likes it, even if I’m the only one who will ever read it. I need to do this for my own benefit. I just need to find a constant stream of inspiration instead of it finding me in short bursts.

It’s those fleeting moments of creativity that I find the most frustrating. Why do I always find myself wanting to write when I can’t? Why is it that when I have all the free time in the world I can’t seem to get out a single word? I just wish I could get a handle on my mind, slap it around a little bit, straighten it out and make it work for me. My head’s definitely an annoying place. Most people don’t want to deal with it and really, I can’t blame them ‘cause I find myself not wanting to deal, either. I just miss that time when I used to be able to sit down and write pages upon pages with little to no effort at all. It was my release, it was my therapy, it was my way out of myself. And now, it seems like it’s all changed. It seems it always changes. Anytime I find something that works, it doesn’t anymore. I’m always chasing that chance at sanity, always running toward rumination. And it's always so coy and elusive and never stays long enough. I just wanna be able to clamp down on a way to release my emotions so that I'll know where to go when I need to vent, know what to do when I become upset and know how to share my rare moments of happiness.

Ugh, make up your mind, mind!