A Writer's Confession

It’s been awhile since I’ve written and for that I am truly sorry. I’ve been a pathetic excuse of a writer as of late. I haven’t been writing.

                I haven’t been writing because I haven’t been reading and I haven’t been reading because, I think, sometime over the past year my sense of wonder and imagination has started to die. I hate to admit it, but there’s been times that I’ve thought of giving up writing all together. What good is it doing me anyway? It’s not paying the bills.

                Luckily, I continually come back to my senses, or it’s more like I’m dragged back to them because I get so stressed out that my lungs fill with lead and I wake up gasping. It’s on those nights that I clutch my journal the tightest. Because, really, words are what keep me grounded. Without them I am just a ship without an anchor lost in a sea of chaos. This sea of chaos –this sea of life –isn’t one you should sail without an anchor. Yet, I keep cutting mine off, only to mend it when I realize what a terrible mistake I’ve made.

                It’s not always because I don’t want to write –though a lot of the time nowadays it is –but because I feel like I shouldn’t have to force it. Writing is an art, a craft, a trade…that’s why we’re called wordsmiths; because we shape sentences like a blacksmith shapes a sword. We choose our content as carefully as he chooses his metal. But what good is a craft if you don’t have the passion for it? There should be some kind of emotion attached to it. I don’t care what anyone says, there has to be some kind of raw emotion or else you don’t have a story. You’d only have a clump of letters. Not even letters, just a clump of meaningless lines.

                The thing is, I do have the passion. I just seem to misplace it sometimes. It drives me crazy because every fiber of my being wants to write, but I’ve been ignoring their wishes. Why? Because, “Writing will get you nowhere.”

                What am I accomplishing by writing? That’s time I could be using to do something productive like looking for a second job or getting my foot in the door to start apartment hunting. It’s time I could spend sculpting my life. Even now, as I sit here on my black duvet with the pretty white vines creeping up it, and with three fans complaining about overuse since the air conditioner went out, I’m thinking about how today was my last day of summer work and how I don’t go back to work until August, and how even with all the subbing I’ll be doing I need to get a second job because I’ve got student loans to pay off. Which I took out for a school that I don’t even know was worth my time anymore.

                So, I stop writing.

                I have more important things to do than weave tales of wonder.

                Then I get stressed. The atmosphere feels off. The world turns grey. I get depressed and irritated. I start dreaming that I’m dying and wake up at three or four in the morning because I can’t breathe. It’s pathetic and painful.

                It’s only because of a good friend that I’ve kept writing. He’s encouraged me daily to reply to the story we’re writing together. Most days that’s the only writing I do. It’s writing at least, and often times it’s just what I need. It keeps me sane. Without it I’d be lost. I need that escape. I need the fictional worlds and characters.

                Just a couple hours ago, I picked up a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while now. And why? Because it actually felt physically painful to be away from the word of literature. I got lost in thought the other day, thinking about writing and all the stories I’ve started and never finished, and all the stories I’ve started and have, and I started crying.

                I cried because I thought back to the first stories I ever wrote. The first multi chapter story I ever finished. I thought back to the characters, the planets, the events…and I felt homesick. Truly, deeply, homesick.

                I miss them.

                Skyler, Onna, Christopher, Kristy, Tobias, Alexandria, Rianna, Aaron…I miss all of them. Villain and hero alike, I miss them.  

                I took a few moments to think about where each of those characters would be. I ended up falling asleep. I dreamt of them and then I wanted to cry some more, because the lives I saw for them were not the lives I wanted for them. It made me want to sit down and write more of their story. To tell what happened after. Where they all went. If they had families. Those sort of things.

                I didn’t though. I felt like I couldn’t. My writing style has changed so much from when I wrote them into existence that I fear that retouching their stories would only ruin them. Complexity is not the nature of their tales. Words like ostentatious and circumlocution don’t belong in their works. They’re supposed to be simple and I’m afraid that touching them with a mind that’s been shaped by English courses would destroy their purpose. So, I leave them be and weep in nostalgia.

                If studying English has taught me anything it’s that:

1)      Literary critics don’t know what they’re talking about.

2)      Professors put more thought into novels than the actual author did. (Seriously, sometimes the curtain isn’t red because it’s foreshadowing a death, but because the curtain is just freaking red.)

3)      Sometimes simple is better.

4)      No one ever truly reads the same story as another person.

5)      And the best way to learn about writing isn’t to sit in a dusty old classroom with broken windows and a faulty projector, while reading Emerson or making jokes about Thoreau, or discussing the importance of a falcon and a spiral. The best way to learn is to write.

In all honesty, my English classes –the ones designed to teach about literature, its purpose, and its connection to the human condition –made me hate reading and, in turn, made me not want to write. Sad to say, but it’s true.

There was a time, not too long ago, that I had forgotten how to read without over analyzing a book. How to read just for fun and not to pass some dumb quiz about absurd details that matter very little when compared to the overall story. I’m working on that now. On fixing my reading habits. So far I’ve started reading five books and have finished none of them. I eventually decided that if I want to write something worth my time then I better read something worth my time. So I closed all the books I was reading, because I’m not going to read something that I can’t get into, and picked up a new one.

I had a professor once –he was actually my favorite English teacher –that said that he gave every book he read fifty pages. If after fifty pages it couldn’t keep his interest then he’d move on to something else because either the story wasn’t worth his time or it just wasn’t the right time to read the story. I’ve picked up that rule.

I’m currently reading a book that a friend recommended to me. It’s called Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller. I’m only in the third chapter but so far it’s been nothing short of amazing. I found myself in it within the first few pages. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that connected to a story. It feels great.

I only hope that as I read it I start to write more. Because I really want to finish writing Refracted and actually get all those ideas I have down on paper into the story. I want to get lost again in a sea of words. I want to feel the tranquil waters of the vision wash over me. Surround me and wrap me in a silky cocoon, so that when I’m done writing and reading I’ll have left the stories impacted. Left them with new wings. That’s my hope.