After an extremely long week of arduous studying and (one) disastrous final, all I wanted to do post-finals was to crawl into bed, go on my computer, and relax. But while heading back to my room, I was suddenly struck with the thought, “Shoot. I need to write my Odyssey article.” And then I sped-walked home, only to start writing five hours later (oops).
As a fairly new content creator who has only been recently putting out articles, you might wonder why I joined The Odyssey and what am I doing. Logistically, the requirements for being a part of The Odyssey aren’t difficult- every week we are expected to write a new piece that is to be published at the beginning of the next week.
Ever since middle school, I had always loved writing, especially creative writing. Short stories, vignettes, paragraph fragments, you name it. My mind was always buzzing with ideas, things I could write about, snippets that I could put down physically on paper or digitally on a screen. In middle school I wrote stories with my best friend (s/o to Jenny Lee, also a part of The Odyssey!), in high school I was vice president of a writing club that I had helped found with other like-minded people who simply loved to write.
Unfortunately, as I got older and as soon as I started college, all of my creative writing abilities became stifled. Instead of fun and wondrous ideas, my mind was now filled with the next assignment to do, instead of writing down short-stories, I was writing papers. Whatever I could have written about I either didn’t have the time to do, wanted to rest, or lacked motivation to actually sit down at a computer and type. As sad as it sounds, I began to see creative writing as not worth it, as a waste of time that could be spent doing other more “productive” things. (A lot of this could be chalked up to laziness BUT...) Although sparks of creativity still came here and there, my motivation had been completely killed by the busyness of school, of my life. And there were moments in college when I struggled with this- how could I claim to love writing when I never even did it?
It scared me that I was losing my ability to write, a skill that I had prized so highly before in my life. Full-fledged plots, character development, descriptive language was all foreign to me now, and that realization filled me with a sense of melancholy, almost mourning. It was only very recently that I thought, if I was to continue carrying in college in the same busy cycle as always, I was never going to actually go back to writing creativity, at least not by my own will and motivation. I needed to create some motivation for myself. I needed something to get me to write, and to keep me writing. And that is why I joined The Odyssey... and that is why you see a new article posted on my Facebook every week.
I strongly believe that anything you do creatively, or anything that is your passion, shouldn’t necessarily be confined within timelines and due dates. To me, timelines and due dates always inevitably put a strain on my writing, causing me to compromise the quality of it in a hurried effort to turn it in. A week isn’t a very long time to write a piece, edit it, and be fully content enough with it to have it be published. Good writing is writing in which one can write it over the course of many days, leave it and go back to it, incrementally make small changes and tweaks until one is completely satisfied with it. That is why I loved writing on my own- there was no pressure to make my writing appeal to any specific person, I could spend as much time as I wanted on it to revise. I wrote to satisfy myself; until I was satisfied with my own writing, until there was nothing more I could edit, everything before my final version were just drafts. And that is how I view my articles sometimes, as drafts. It is writing that communicates my general ideas in a rudimentary and coarse manner. Had I more time, I would polish my pieces until I was fully content.
Yet, if I did not have such deadlines, would I have even written anything at all? And this, is what I call the writer’s paradox: I need a deadline to write, but what I write doesn’t end up as good as I want it to be because of the deadline. It’s this feeling of slight discouragement mixed with futility. I want to keep writing so I join The Odyssey to give me the motivation to write, but what I write I am never fully satisfied with.
It was the feeling of knowing that my writing could be better than what I was putting out that caused me to feel frustrated. Good writing is not rushed. (I say this now as I am furiously trying to type out this article for submission.) So what should I do? Should I not impose deadlines upon myself in hopes of better writing? Should I remove myself from this paradox and focus on the intrinsic value and my own personal enjoyment of writing? There were so many questions that caused me to experience doubt. Doubt in myself, in the quality of my writing. But even now, as some of the questions remained unanswered, there are a few things I know to be true: 1) I like to write, but I lack motivation, 2) Deadlines give me, although perhaps not the most ideal, motivation in order to get me to write, 3) Produced written works are good.
What I write for The Odyssey might not be my best works, and there are often times when I self-critically read back over my articles and facepalm myself over noticeable typos, stylistically bad writing, grammatical errors, and word choice. Sure, I don’t have enough time to create something that I am 100% completely satisfied with, but I am still writing. The paradox has trapped me but I’m okay with staying in it, because writing drafts is better than not writing at all. And I’m glad that The Odyssey has allowed me to start once again and continue doing what I had always loved.
So to all those who love writing, who want to write but don’t as often as you would like, who lack time, motivation, or even inspiration, I encourage you to find something that will get you to continue to write. Writing is a beautiful, admirable, and often underestimated passion, don’t let it die out. Practice it, sacrifice time, force it even, and you’ll be surprised at how much your writing will grow and what you are capable of creating, (even if it is within deadlines).
