If any of you know me in person, you probably are well acquainted with the fact that I am almost never left without anything to say. My gears are constantly turning -- my mind constantly moving. However, for the past couple of weeks, my words have severely been lacking.
They say that writers, good writers at least, should be able to pull something out of their asses no matter the situation. It's our job to be creative that way, right? And yes, although that philosophy may be true when it comes to an English essay on the use of consciousness as a subjective indicator of identity in Ernest J. Gaines' "A Lesson Before Dying," I am of the belief that what I write on this platform - or almost any other for that matter -- must come from myself. Like Ernest Hemingway told Martha Gellhorn: "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
Sometimes, my blood doesn't run pure with the thoughts and emotions that make me a writer; sometimes my blood pulses through my veins willing me to live life and remain in the moment. You see, a good writer has to extrapolate and remove him, or herself, from the situation at hand, viewing life as objectively as possible despite whatever degree of subjectivity is required. A good writer has to walk a mile in another's shoes, bleed another's blood, and listen to the voices of another as well as one's own.
I refuse to acknowledge that I currently suffer from the dreaded writer's block because if I do, then I succumb to admitting that my life fails to be interesting. So instead, I have to remind myself why I write.
I wrote my first book when I was six years old. Written with felt tip, Crayola markers on stationary paper my mother gifted me for Christmas the day before, I both wrote and illustrated a story about a six year-old girl named Nan, who discovered that she was a mermaid after she ran away from home, escaping through the woods until she reached the sea. She swam across oceans, visited countries, met new people and experienced life in its fullest glory before returning home to the welcoming arms of her family. I still have the book, its corners curled and edges yellowed, stashed beneath a stack of writing, in a shoebox, under my bed. Since then, I cannot remember a time when words were not important to me.
When I tell the story of Nan, who continues to lay untouched in a shoebox under my bed, I usually explain it within the context of my love for languages -- that words take me places. They satiate my wanderlust because words depict a world that is so much more than what meets the eye. Language, especially in the art of writing, is a craft that possesses as much time, love, and care as a German woodcarver or a Renaissance painter. With delicate hands, I meticulously piece together letters to form words and words to build sentences, articulating myself in a way I never could had I been verbalizing myself. And in doing so, I methodically articulate the thoughts of others who cannot do so themselves.
Writing satisfies my urgent desire to articulate what I am feeling when life does not always give me the chance to do so. I write because I feel compelled to speak for those who cannot speak themselves. I write because I want to possess a voice and speak loudly enough to be heard. And I write because it gives me a sense of purpose, confidence, and wholeness that satisfies some mystic void in the universe.
Jack London once said, "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." Not knowing what to say, sometimes, is not the end of the world because the point of life is to live, experience, and understand. Being afraid to put pen to paper is the same as saying that I am afraid to live, and when it comes to life, I am absolutely fearless.
