I fell in love with writing like you fall in love with a really good dream. You want to replay the dream over and over in your head. You try your best not to move out of your position. You lay your head on your pillow at the exact angle it was in when you woke up. You try to remember details, a valiant effort to recreate the image in your head, but the lingering joy dissipates and you are once again left in reality.
Writing is the same way. Sometimes you sit down to work, and you feel stuck. You have set up your environment: water, snacks, your laptop or pen and paper, but the inspiration you seek escapes you. You have the ideas in your head and you struggle to form the perfect sentence to express them. Or you have no ideas, just fragments of potentially strong sentences. It's frustrating. Sometimes, you find your flow. The words appear on the paper describing the scene or explaining a concept in the way it looks in your mind. Sometimes, brilliance strikes at 3 am when you can't sleep. Just like a dream, you hurry to grab it and trap on paper. Ideas are wild animals and words tame them.
I can't imagine what my life would be like if I did not have words to articulate what was going on in my mind. To not be able to write and save your thoughts and look at them, is amazing. Before writing, oral tradition transferred stories and ideas from generation to generation. I love hearing a good story, but reading one over and over is a different experience. You can read it on your own time, at your own pace, rather than wait for another person to say it. Being able to hold a book and see the words between your fingers is better than replaying a sentence in your head.
Writing has taught me patience and perseverance. Like anything involving the creation, it requires time and effort. At one point, I rarely reread my writing. I did not want to view it as a draft. Once it was down on paper, it would largely stay the same way. Editing and revising helped me accept that I could always improve. Good could become great, great could become better, and better would hopefully become best. Writing cannot always be forced out, you need the patient to coax out the right words. You need the patience to reread the same awkward sentence repeatedly to finally find what word is making the sentence get stuck in your throat. You need patience to not give up after getting writer's block after one sentence.
As I write this, I am glad I never gave up on writing when I was younger. Some people are dedicated to practicing instruments. Some commit to a sport. I decided to continue writing, even when it feels like I have no time.
