Why I Write

I feel like I’ve been going through a bout of writer’s block lately. I’ll sit down to write a short story or a blog entry or something and end up discarding it after half a page or so. To combat this, I’ve set a goal for myself – every day this week, I’m going to sit down and whip out 650-700 words, one single-spaced page. Call it a way to get the creative juices flowing again. I’m not expecting brilliance, but maybe I’ll come up with a seed that I can turn into something worthwhile later on.

A logical question is why I feel this need to get myself back on track, writing-wise. Long story short, I enjoy it. I like putting my thoughts down on paper, organizing them, giving them eloquence. It always takes me a while to get started (the first page of an essay usually takes about three times as long to write as any of the succeeding ones), but once I fall into a groove, I just plain lose track of time. I become absorbed in the words I’ve written, whether what I’ve just written is any good, how I can make it better, where, if anywhere, I’m going with it, etc.

Example: I had to write a short story for my creative writing class a few weeks ago. I started and abandoned two stories in the week leading up to the due date because I just wasn’t feeling them. The story was due at two p.m. on a Wednesday; my third attempt, the one I ended up turning in, I started late Monday night. I only have one class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which basically gave me the entire day to produce and proofread a fifteen-pager. That Tuesday, I wrote from about 11:30 in the morning to midnight solid, minus two short breaks for lunch and dinner. Not only did I not begrudge the amount of time I spent on this thing, I actively enjoyed it – finishing, I wished I had more to say and more time to say it. There are very few activities that I can just fall into like this without getting restless or distracted. I almost feel an obligation to myself to pursue it as much as possible.

The last time I felt prolific as a writer was when I had a Xanga during my sophomore and junior years of high school. I updated it pretty consistently, at least once a week, usually more. My material, however, left something to be desired – it didn’t really hit me until about a year after I gave it up what an unmitigated clusterfuck it was. Everything that a normal person would write in a private diary, I published on the Internet, blissfully unaware of the hole I dug deeper with each entry. I cursed people out by name, I bitched about my acne, about how I didn’t have a girlfriend, about how lonely I was because no one ever called me, etc. I can’t believe anyone could write so naively about such personal subject matter, let alone me, but then, I can’t believe I did a lot of the stuff that I did during high school.

My point is that I enjoy writing, but I equally enjoy people reading what I write. George Orwell was right – the number one reason that writers do what they do is sheer egoism. I could have just vented my problems into some secret Microsoft Word file and never looked at them again, but at the time, I felt that everything I had to say was worth sharing with the world. I’d say I’m better now, but I’m not. I’m just wiser. I’m more discerning about what I can post here and what I should probably keep private. My egoism is probably best evidenced by my project for this week. It’d be easier to just blather about some issues that have been on my mind lately in a spiral notebook or something, but it seems like a waste to let a week’s worth of work go unseen by anyone except me.

I already have some topics in mind for my next couple self-mandated assignments, which itself is half the battle. The fact that I’m looking forward to sitting down tomorrow and starting my next “column,” if you want to call it that, gives me hope that I might actually stick with it. I’m a very bad self-motivator, as anyone who knows me can attest. I’m well past my quota for the day, so I’m off to start a philosophy essay about how Communism is a worthy ideal in theory if not in practice. Reference number five in my previous post. Wish me luck.