On Writing III

Written October 2007.

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."  -Gustave Flaubert

I still have a hard time calling myself a writer.  I still can’t define what a writer is.  Can anyone be a writer?  Sure.  I suppose, in a way, anyone can.  Overall, we are all writers.  We’ve all written down our thoughts down at one point or another, whether in a small locked journal that we kept under the bed or for a writing assignment in school.  We write because we are instructed to.  We write because we are frustrated.  We write for leisure.  But where is the line drawn between a casual writer and a serious writer?  Is that line within us, or do other people define that distinction?  Can you only call yourself a writer if it’s what you do as a profession?  Can you call yourself a writer only if you’ve been published? 

I started out writing ‘cause I was jumping on the blog bandwagon so many years ago.  What once started out as a hip thing to do, filling my electronic pages with mindless daily duties became something more for me.  I realized writing was a medium in which I could manifest my maniacal mind.  I realized I could turn to writing when I couldn’t turn to friends.  And it was much healthier than turning to food.  I realized writing had become a sort of therapy for me, but much, much cheaper.  I realized I could express myself in writing in a way that I could not with drawing or painting.  I realized that I could probably be more honest with pen and paper than I could looking into the eyes of another and feeling ashamed by what I felt.  There’s no judgment when it’s just me and my thoughts.  It’s just raw, honest emotion.

I started writing stories.  I wrote the kind of stories I wish I could read.  I injected personal problems into these fictional characters that came from my fingertips.  By doing so, I breathed life into these otherwise two dimensional beings.  I took my pains and transformed them into what I thought at the time were good stories.  I realized I could change that pain, maybe even reverse it, through writing.  Writing felt good.  Cathartic.  Throughout the years, I realized my writing had changed drastically.  I realized I wasn’t essentially documenting my days anymore.  I was recording my ruminations.  I was chronicling my contemplations on my life and myself.  I felt I grew as a writer and as a person through my own words.  I learned a lot about myself in the process.  When I would sit down and want to write about hating myself, I was forced to examine why I felt that way.  I was forced to examine why my self-esteem was so low.  I was forced to examine how I turned out how I did.  And although I can pretty much tell why I am the way I am, I’m still not completely there.  I haven’t gotten myself completely figured out yet.  But I’m so much farther than I was.  And I credit most of that to writing.  Without writing, I wouldn’t have been pushed to pursue a reason for the way I felt about things, people, and myself. 

And, as with everything else creative in my life, I found frustration with writing.  When I first discovered writing, it was a new toy.  All these ideas and thoughts and wonderful pieces of pure brilliance came out of me.  All of these emotions that had been built up within me now had a way out and were they ever eager to break free.  I was a machine.  Eventually that steam stagnated and I found myself with a constipated cranium.  I found it harder to write about the same issues that I had already covered.  It seems to me there are recurring themes in my writing and each time I try to once again tackle one of those themes, I find myself being redundant.  It’s hard to inject freshness into a stale idea.  Yet, I’m forced to because I can’t seem to get over certain aspects of my life.  And what helps me get over those certain aspects?  Writing about it.  So I find myself writing about the same things, while at the same time trying not to replicate my regrets or restate my sorrows.  There was something so refreshing about finding a new tool to tackle my mental anguish.  But now, I find myself slipping away from that sense of satisfaction that I felt so long ago when I first discovered, “Hey!  I think I have something here!”

I’ll sit in class while I’m taking notes and a line of poetry will pop into m head and I will think, “Oh, that’s good.  I gotta use that.”  And it’s usually not enough to make a legitimate entry out of, yet I do try.  In some ways, I find some ideas irrelevant and unnecessary, while in other ways I find it a unique trait to be able to center a story around such mundane topics like as washing towels or resting in the raw.  The trick is to make it entertaining.  I believe a great writer can make wallpaper interesting.  Oh, someone already did (thank you Charlotte Perkins Gilman).  I feel I should start filtering my thoughts a bit more.  Just ‘cause it’s a nice thought doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good enough to translate to my diary.  I was looking through my old diary and was amazed at some of the stuff I wrote.  It was quite good.  Usually as an artist’s talent grows, they feel the opposite way.  They usually believe the more they work, the farther along they become in their abilities, the better the product.  Since I feel like my writing has worsened, maybe it means I’m losing it.  Of course, I’ve felt this way before and then went on to write some of the best stuff I’ve ever written, but that feeling is inescapable and scary.  And I’m so worried it’s a sign of my declining talent.  What once was a diary used for contemplation and culture commentary has now become a medium in which I drivel on about the mundane misadventures of my moldy existence.  And I just don’t like that.

I don’t know if I’m qualified to call myself a writer anymore, if I ever was at all.  It's just that so much goes through my mind and I don't have the time or the energy to get it out, to write it the way I want, to translate it the way I feel I need to to get the most impact.  So instead of taking the time I feel I need, I simply scrawl it all down in hopes that I'll free up enough brain space to write about the important things the way I want to.  I have so many ideas clogging up my brain that I have to free it any way I can.  Even if that means writing garbage until I can recapture that magic medium once more.