The process of writing is obnoxious. It irritates me, brings me to the brink of losing patience, and easily casts me down into the depths of frustration. I transform from a happily messy person into a perfectionist. I make sure every word is adequately positioned, ensuring that no other synonym would better the sentence. I struggle with the tone I want to display as a writer, teetering between flowery and concrete. I am consistently unsure of the type of writer I want to be: a journalist, novelist, poet, songwriter; with writing there is just an overwhelming sense of freedom.
A freedom that rarely is tangible today. A blank page: no previous dispositions or expectations.
One can express each and every thought thinkable.
I chain myself to that freedom. I keep a notebook in my purse, beside my bed and in my backpack. Leaving without a pen is just as worrisome as leaving my cellphone at home. I cannot listen to a wonderful sentence being said without scrambling to write it down in my small brown velvet journal for fear that I one day may forget how I felt in that moment.
There is no such thing as simply going through the motions while writing. It demands creativity, uniqueness and balance between logic and heart. I find myself writing fiction based on the world around me, turning people into characters and lessons into themes. After an argument, the stairs are blurred underneath my feet as I race to sit up on my bed and detail everything. Writing heals even when the hurt is just settling in. In days of confusion, each word serves as a therapy session, inclining another word to be revealed. Whereas recording days of immense happiness makes me feel as if I am instilling sunshine permanently. I am documenting a moment, claiming it for recollection.
There are rules to writing, yet some of the greatest novelists, poets and screenwriters, don't follow them.
The bending of those rules lets me use happy as a noun; happy is an is, to me anyways.
I write for the hours of internal questioning, blank stares at empty pages and that its-on-the-tip-of -my-tongue notion. Not because I am masochistic, but because until I write I am never quite sure of what I feel. It is as if the second my pen reaches paper all emotions and thinkings are visible. I write for documentation, self expression, challenge and truth.
Writing is so obnoxious. It makes me doubt myself, it makes me cringe at my hand writing and requires my full attention. All the while, writing makes me confident, appreciate my character and quirks and fills my mind with the belief that I can create magic.
I believe writers have similar intentions of a street performer. Perhaps for monetary purposes, following passions, attention, flirting with enchantment, expression...
All to see who will stop and look.
Writing in a way is a balancing act, it requires writers to look outside and within themselves, with an inkling of the potential fall. Yet those who write experience that suspicion and are able to share it.
The process of writing is so many adjectives, but it is happy.
