Finding My Voice Again (aka Why I Write)
First, a little writing music.
(Okay, so it's not writing music. But occasionally, I do like to rock out to Rush.)
I've had an epiphany of sorts.
Epiphany might not by the right word. Revelation? Self-Discovery? An acknowledgement? I'm just not sure what the proper phrasing is supposed to be. The most accurate term might be "realization."
It's clumsy, but I realized something the other day.
I know why I've been struggling with my writing lately. It has nothing to do with having enough time, or lacking inspiration, or having a nice set of notebooks or writing implements.
It has little to do with the funk I've been in lately, although it is very much something mental. The issue at hand with my writing is that I've stopped writing for the audience that has mattered the most.
I've stopped writing for myself.
The first time I remember writing for pleasure was in the seventh grade. It was during lunchtime. Some of the boys in my class would play touch football on the narrow street that ran alongside the school. This was an impressive feat when you consider that the street ran downhill (it was a one way street) at a 40-45 degree angle.
It's not like I wasn't a fan of sports, but as the slow, fat kid, I just wasn't interested in running around and not getting thrown the ball. Instead, I took an extra composition book (traditional black and white marble-of course) and wrote my first short story. It was a noir detective story set in late 1980s New York City. That's all I can remember about it. That notebook got lost a long time ago. I assume that it couldn't have been any good; I was all of 12 years old at the time apeing what I thought a traditional genre should look and sound like. Also, it was a first draft, and I never went back to revise it. I wasn't trying to craft a great story; I was writing for me.
Flash forward a couple of years. I'm 15 years old and in my sophomore year in high school. I fell—hard!—for a girl who went to my high school's sister institution. (Or one of them at least; I would've said we had two. It depended on what crowd you ran with, I guess.)
I was dealing with unrequited tennage affection, and then my dad passed away kind of suddenly.
I wound up picking up a new black and white marble composition book and started writing. This time, song lyrics and poems. I still have this notebook, although I think I've lost some pages over time. Which is a shame, although I think I separated out the best ones from the notebook and recorded them in other places for posterity's sake. (More on this in another post.)
That notebook moved with me to college, and I continued to write a little in it until I just ran out of room in it. I would also use notebooks from class, legal pads, whatever scraps of paper I could use to jot down lyrics and poems. Some eventually made it onto disks in Word documents, but some (sadly) got lost in garbage cans or wherever lost papers make their way in the world. But I was in full songwriting/lyric writing mode in high school and college.
After grad school, I found myself writing about sports for a web site that still exists, but also swallowed some of my writing. Oh, well. It was also about the time I started writing for this first site (E-sports) that I started to try and write a full length novel. I'm still working on it over a decade later, with many false starts wedged in there.
Which (long windedly) leads back to the main point. Somewhere along the line, I went from writing simply for my own amusement to, I guess, trying to write for some larger aim. I'm not wholly sure what that larger aim is, though.
What I do know, though, is that I have to throw off whatever mental shackles I have and get back to basics. I need to make writing fun again.
Easier said than done, though.
(Okay, so it's not writing music. But occasionally, I do like to rock out to Rush.)
I've had an epiphany of sorts.
Epiphany might not by the right word. Revelation? Self-Discovery? An acknowledgement? I'm just not sure what the proper phrasing is supposed to be. The most accurate term might be "realization."
It's clumsy, but I realized something the other day.
I know why I've been struggling with my writing lately. It has nothing to do with having enough time, or lacking inspiration, or having a nice set of notebooks or writing implements.
It has little to do with the funk I've been in lately, although it is very much something mental. The issue at hand with my writing is that I've stopped writing for the audience that has mattered the most.
I've stopped writing for myself.
The first time I remember writing for pleasure was in the seventh grade. It was during lunchtime. Some of the boys in my class would play touch football on the narrow street that ran alongside the school. This was an impressive feat when you consider that the street ran downhill (it was a one way street) at a 40-45 degree angle.
It's not like I wasn't a fan of sports, but as the slow, fat kid, I just wasn't interested in running around and not getting thrown the ball. Instead, I took an extra composition book (traditional black and white marble-of course) and wrote my first short story. It was a noir detective story set in late 1980s New York City. That's all I can remember about it. That notebook got lost a long time ago. I assume that it couldn't have been any good; I was all of 12 years old at the time apeing what I thought a traditional genre should look and sound like. Also, it was a first draft, and I never went back to revise it. I wasn't trying to craft a great story; I was writing for me.
Flash forward a couple of years. I'm 15 years old and in my sophomore year in high school. I fell—hard!—for a girl who went to my high school's sister institution. (Or one of them at least; I would've said we had two. It depended on what crowd you ran with, I guess.)
I was dealing with unrequited tennage affection, and then my dad passed away kind of suddenly.
I wound up picking up a new black and white marble composition book and started writing. This time, song lyrics and poems. I still have this notebook, although I think I've lost some pages over time. Which is a shame, although I think I separated out the best ones from the notebook and recorded them in other places for posterity's sake. (More on this in another post.)
That notebook moved with me to college, and I continued to write a little in it until I just ran out of room in it. I would also use notebooks from class, legal pads, whatever scraps of paper I could use to jot down lyrics and poems. Some eventually made it onto disks in Word documents, but some (sadly) got lost in garbage cans or wherever lost papers make their way in the world. But I was in full songwriting/lyric writing mode in high school and college.
After grad school, I found myself writing about sports for a web site that still exists, but also swallowed some of my writing. Oh, well. It was also about the time I started writing for this first site (E-sports) that I started to try and write a full length novel. I'm still working on it over a decade later, with many false starts wedged in there.
Which (long windedly) leads back to the main point. Somewhere along the line, I went from writing simply for my own amusement to, I guess, trying to write for some larger aim. I'm not wholly sure what that larger aim is, though.
What I do know, though, is that I have to throw off whatever mental shackles I have and get back to basics. I need to make writing fun again.
Easier said than done, though.
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