It is magic to me. It's been hard trying to contain everything within and hoping to deliver them to their proper destinations (different notebooks for each different kind of writing). It hasn't been like this in a long time, and it's hard to sit here and try to explain my joy, delight and the happiness this has given me. It's even silly. For someone like me, who relishes in writing, who defines herself with and in politics and writing, who turns different inimical traits of herself into positive for the sake of writing (and only for the sake of writing, I'd like to note here that other wise I would have been far too skeptical, bitter and difficult woman), who puts herself into a regimen so she can become a better writer, who restlessly focuses on her mistakes and spends hours, days and weeks, even months trying to correct one mistake.
The only reason why I put my life into a daily schedule was so that I could become a better writer. I focus in the mornings on technicalities and at night I write to my heart's content (usually, obviously there are exceptions and forgoing meals often) because that's how much writing means to me. I hate regimens, orders and monotone. I hate doing things in specific order and following it religiously. I like spontaneity, I like doing things as I want and feel, but I pulled my life into a order of religiously to be followed for the sake of one day becoming a good writer and a full-fledged one..eventually. Maybe sometime in the next four decades I'll accomplish that. Whether I get published or not, or make a cent off of it or not, really doesn't matter to me at the least bit. It is true I am an aspiring writer, hoping one day to publish stuff, but hope is what writers made out of. Regardless, it's not a criteria I set myself up to possess. It's not a goal I have to accomplish in my life. So I reinvent myself as many times as possible, in the hopes to become a better writer. Now that's said, and I've went straight into writing again as soon as I came back home from my not so successful job hunt.
But I am happy, happier than I've been in such a long time--because I have a bigger gift...my will to write. Strings of lines, ideas, stories never cease in my mind or in my imaginary world I live vicariously through. But I had lost the will to write or record them...which does not happen often. But I just could not get myself to sit in my chair and write anything down, for what felt like an eternity to me. Even blogging had ceased and was about pointless things. So this brings me to what I've wanted to really say all along. The will to write.
I really don't believe in writer's block. There is always about a million things to write about. If you're living, you can write. Now let me elaborate. This doesn't mean that everything you write will become published, or is even good enough to be published, or will be well liked, and even if it does get published, this does not mean that it will sell well. One can write about endless possibilities of things...the sun out of your window, your neighbors as they'll surely have quirky stories behind them, the frustrations in traffic, inconveniences caused by summer constructions in Wisconsin and New York, the new gift you received, you will give and etc. Book reviews, essays, and what not. Ideas are endless but there is never any guarantee of your idea being good once it's transferred over to paper. Things often have a way of sounding better in your mind with your own background noise, because as it's creator, you're more likely to believe in what you are thinking and be kind towards it so it can grow to a budding flower.
Will to write however is entirely different. It related directly towards whether you believe what you are writing is worth anyone's interest, or genuinely believing what you're writing on that piece of paper isn't silly and useless and will attract no one's attention, including yours. So it requires confidence of the writer to believe that what she or he is writing to be important, to have the possibility of leaving a mark on someone's soul or be given the opportunity of having found one of many of universe's secret laws and truths. Each time we write, we not only discover something about ourselves (no writer has ever written anything without discovering new boundaries for her or himself, new depths, new lows and new personality traits, different hopes, or a long forgotten memory of the past) but also we believe to have observed, tried and successfully proven a hypothesis about people, their emotions, their bonds, and their link to the rest of the humanity.
No matter what the focus of a novel, short story or a poem is, it always moves from one of two directions. Individual or general; and eventually it will make the leap towards the opposite, and then come back in relation to the original focus of the work. So we like to think we understand the human psyche, and we will always have an idea about how human relationships should work in relation to ourselves, others, technology, nature/universe. We see how it works, but as we're delusional people, we will argue how it ought to work. We don't like traditions, labels, constrains on expression and human experience, and have a different understanding of ethics and values, along with morality--so we further lose ourselves in these figments of imaginations that we've build firstly in our own inner worlds. So to have the will to write about it is entirely a different imagination than not having a content or something else to write. I guess the will to write kind of relates back to having a muse or an inspiration...or how badly you want to write, rather than having an idea to write about.
There are so many things to explore, so much work out there to be influenced from that it's just hard not to be a prolific writer. And that is the difference between a good writer and just a writer who writes without understanding the craft, the responsibilities, consequences and the meaning of writing. A writer who publishes his or her exercises, and thinking the mass volume of work that's piled up will always be worth anything and will try to get them all published. Then there is a good writer who sees that practices are necessary to write meaningful and crafty literature and will use his or her past work to write better works of literature. So, I guess in conclusion, I am an adamant believer in the will to write to be a necessary pre-requisite to picking up the pen rather than believing writers being in possession of a writer's block, as finding nothing to write about.
On that note, I'll leave you to this poem that I received :) Enjoy.
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