i waited in the darkness for light

Somewhere, I lost a month. June was a monster.

I got back to Portland and was nearly crippled with homesickness. It took me a few weeks to even start to feel somewhat “normal” again. I know my family doesn’t want me to be homesick, at least not to the point of near-incapacitation, but I actually would prefer that feeling never goes away. I don’t want to grow away from where I belong. I want to always feel that pull to be there.

My father’s father died almost immediately after I left home again, which made things worse. All I could think about was how badly I wanted to be there, to do whatever I could to help him through such a difficult thing, and to help my mother with whatever support she needed through it. Instead I was stuck thousands of miles away. They got through it, of course, just fine without me. My parents are brave, strong, resilient people, and inspire me every day.

Then I had finals. Papers and more papers to write. I don’t really even remember much of that week except that I didn’t sleep much. I was at the library most of every day. I was relieved when it was over.

My other grandfather had to have a surgery regarding a bout with cancer, and is recovering well. I was still a nervous wreck that day, and for a while after. I don’t even want to talk about it, really. I just wanted to acknowledge that it happened.

I started my second job at the newspaper. Long, long hours of staring at the same pages over and over again: proofreading and making changes before sending them to the production team, then proofing again for errors inserted in the production process. At the end of the day, I’ve all but memorized every story. It’s still interesting, and I’m damn good at it, so I’m happy with it.

Other than that, I’ve been writing (fiction) quite a lot. I started a side project, sort of as a joke idea, and it somehow spiraled out of control. I’m now sitting at almost 40,000 words written. To give an idea — NaNoWriMo suggests 50,000 words as a minimum completed novel. I don’t know if this will end up being something I seek any kind of publication for, or if it will simply remain something I did for my own private enjoyment. At this point, it’s not something I would share with my family or friends, but maybe eventually.

It’s late, and I’m tired… I’ve been putting in 15 hour days this week to get everything done. It’s stressful but rewarding. But for now, I’m just going to crawl into bed.

(listening to: Casey Stratton, “Still Life”)

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oh, how quiet the world can be when it’s just you and little me

I’ve been absolutely swamped with work and school lately. I don’t think I’ve even got time right now to really write something coherent and thoughtful, so in lieu of that I’ll just update on what’s going on. I’m not pleased about it, but there it is. I’m only going to bother writing about the busy/good things, because I really can’t let myself get bothered with the rest right now.

I’ve had a lot of projects going on for work, writing articles and having to research a lot of things because I’m not readily familiar with them. At times, it’s a little bit frightening because I feel I’m in over my head sometimes, but once I swallow that back and buckle down to work, it seems to go all right. I really can’t imagine what this would be like if I had to try to fit my schedule into specific hours, instead of just working from home when my schedule is clear. If I feel frazzled now, I don’t even want to think of what that would be like. It’s nice, anyway, to be learning things and feel like my job is challenging me. Today I got to know a couple of the guys in the office a little better after a meeting, so I feel like I’m more part of a team. I’m going to be putting in actual face-time in the office for a project I’m working on, so it helps to actually know the coworkers…

It’s crunch-time at the literary magazine I’m working on, as we’re reviewing submissions and going into the publication process. Since this is my first term on this particular magazine (although I’ve worked on several others in the past), I’m sort of following the lead of the others and learning as I go. I think it’s a lot of fun, but I think the editor-in-chief takes on most of the stress. I think next week we’re going to be meeting to go over formatting and things of that nature, and I’m really excited to see that whole process.

For my fiction class, I’ve started writing what is probably the most emotionally difficult piece I’ve ever written. It’s really poor timing on my part (or on the part of my muse, anyway), with how busy I am, because I don’t feel like I have the energy or the time to devote to the piece to make it be what I want it to be. Even so, the rough draft I took into class today felt pretty solid. I’m missing a lot of dialogue, which I avoid like the plague because I don’t feel I’m very good at writing it… So the revision process is going to be a bit awkward. I have to make time to finish the story sometime between now and Friday, and I’m thinking tomorrow I will probably end up pulling an all-nighter.

Last but not least, I apparently decided I’m just not busy enough, and applied for another job. I went in for the interview on Saturday, and found out Monday that I am officially now the new Chief Copyeditor for my university’s student newspaper. It has a circulation of about 5,000 and I’ll be managing a team of 3-4 copyeditors. I’m really excited about this opportunity to jump headfirst into what I want to do for a living, and there’s just going to be so much for me to learn and gain from it. The staff seems really great and the environment seems like a lot of fun (when appropriate, of course). I’m going to have other responsibilities and opportunities besides the final edits — things like holding seminars to teach staff about AP Style, grammar and punctuation, etc. The school doesn’t have an actual journalism department, so most of the staff is learning on the job. I’m a wee bit nervous about taking on this extra responsibility, but I get to ease into it, at least. I start training next week and won’t officially take over for the current person in the position until after she graduates this summer.

So that’s the goings-on in a nutshell, I suppose. Oh, today’s weird event — a guy approached me while I was waiting for the bus and told me my smile was really pretty, and asked for my number. I told him I was too busy to date, and he gave me his number and made me call him on the spot so he’d know he had my real number. After I got off the bus, he texted me to tell me I’m hot. That was pretty bizarre, but quite a nice ego boost for the day! Ha!

(listening to: Dido, “Don’t Leave Home”)

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life is a blessing, this much i know

Trying to get back into the swing of things after my crazy weekend… It’s weird, because life never really gives you time to process things as they happen. Even afterwards, life is always moving forward, hurtling toward some unseen goal. You can write about it, think about it, but there’s always something new bearing down on your mind and demanding your attention. You can try to compartmentalize, but you can never really get it down properly.

I think I made some new friends over the weekend, which is pretty cool. I met so many interesting people in Vancouver. I was totally outside myself the entire weekend, chatting with strangers and being really friendly. It was really refreshing after being so focused and driven here for the last few months. I have to focus so much on school, work, my various other obligations, and my writing that I don’t go out and socialize nearly enough. It’s true that I can be very much a loner by nature, but really it varies with my mood and what’s going on in my life.

I had a meeting with my fiction professor today about a story I turned in for class. I’d already confessed that it was actually a section out of my novel, so we talked a bit about the book itself, and the process of writing one. I was telling him how intimidating it felt to start it, and how everytime I sit down to write anything I feel a lot of panic and pressure. He told me, “You just need to decide that you’re allowed to create things. Painters don’t look at the canvas and go, ‘Am I allowed to put paint there?’ You have to stop doing that to yourself.” Easier said than done, surely. Still, he’s right. More than anything, I need to learn to save my judgments on quality until I’ve at least finished the writing.

Tonight will be a fun night. I’m going to be doing revisions for a bit. This is the part where I get to use all that judging of quality. Wah.

(listening to: Lou Rhodes, “Each Moment New”)

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oh, mother, tell your children not to do what i have done

I just want to say that writing a novel, or attempting to write a novel, is brutal. I think unintentionally venomous thoughts about everyone I hear say that their novel “just happened,” or that they “didn’t mean to write a novel.” I wish I didn’t mean to write a novel. This would be a lot less painful.

It starts out innocently enough. There’s an idea in the back of your head. Mine’s been there a while, festering for years, begging me to write it out. I flatly refused every time, because it wasn’t something I was ready to do. The particular story in question is deeply personal (even semi-autobiographical) and revisiting some of it is very uncomfortable. That’s putting it mildly. There are times when I’m writing this when I want to run away screaming.

It’s a story that I feel needs to be told. The things that I’m talking about in it — mental illness, family, relationships, painful life experiences, recovery, learning to let yourself live — are things that I think will ultimately be helpful to someone else out there. There are books I’ve read in a similar vein over the years that were beneficial to me, although I’ve never read one that filled the exact need that I had. And that’s okay. My book probably won’t live up to that need either. I’m still going to try. I’m finally in a place where I am able to safely reflect on these matters and attempt to turn them into something good. I think I owe it to myself to try.

The problem — no, one of the many problems — is that once I get my mindset into the book, into writing it, it’s hard to pull myself out. I can’t switch with any sort of ease between daughter or friend to student in class to writer unearthing painful secrets and then switch out into productive employee. My brain locks into specific tasks and roles, and it likes to stay there. I’m extremely fortunate that there’s a lot of leeway for me to work with in these roles that I play. Still, I just spent three hours writing when I was supposed to be doing something else.

It’s exhausting, to be honest. Right now, I’m sitting a little shy of 20,000 words. The generally accepted low end of novel-length is about 50,000 words (there’s a lot of debate on this issue, and what length is considered a novel, but for the most part it can be agreed that 50,000 is a good starting place). The book is nowhere near done, but sometimes I look at the word count and consider walking away. It’s a really unhealthy way to do things, but I can’t help myself. Even doubling what I have now sounds daunting. There’s a lot of ground left for me to cover, and it won’t be fun or easy to do.

It is, however, pretty cathartic. I guess that’s ultimately the point of these kinds of things. One night last week, in a delirium of sleep-deprivation, I likened the process to giving birth. You push, and push, and push, and whatever is coming out of you feels too huge, like it won’t come out, like you can’t do it. You’re sweating, and crying, and bleeding, and you want to take it all back. But then, finally, it’s over, and you’re looking at the most beautiful thing you’ve ever created.

Of course, I’ve never had children.

(listening to: Sinead O’Connor, “House of the Rising Sun”)

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i need to be living life not to flicker but to shine

Oddly enough, the more I write my fiction stuff, the less I feel like I have to say. Not a lot comes to mind when I realize I need to post something on here, or wherever, and I guess it’s because I’ve been pouring all of myself into the things I’m working on. It doesn’t help that I lose track of time very easily when I’m working or writing, so I end up posting at two in the morning.

The last few days have been kind of a whirlwind. I’m now working on the editing staff of my university’s literary magazine, so I had a meeting with the other staff yesterday. They all seem really nice and I’m very much looking forward to working with them. It’s kind of a bummer because the other two girls I met are graduating soon and won’t be on the staff much longer. I was assigned an additional article to do, a sort of spotlight feature on a professor at school, so I have to get to work on that. I also had to give a speech to my writing class about submissions, to try to get them to send stuff in. I think that went well, despite my extreme aversion to public speaking. People seemed receptive and even excited about it, so that’s what counts.

I got my financial aid award information for the 2009-2010 school year. I’ll be getting an additional $3,000 on top of the same amount I got this year, in the form of a work study. I’m not sure how that works, since I already have a job. I’ll have to talk to the financial aid office at some point, I guess. I’m always frustrated by these things because it very much correlates into the beauracracy that universities are, and as a student I don’t usually feel like my needs are being met. For example, I had to schedule an academic advising appointment two weeks in advance, and when I met with the advisor, she simply handed me a course bulletin and told me to pick classes. Thanks.

Work is going well, although I’m feeling a little frazzled right now. We have a site launch at the end of the month and I have a certain number of things I need to be done with by then. It’s not too much work, but there are some things I’m not familiar with, so those parts are going to take me longer to do. I feel a lot of anxiety about things like that, because I feel like if I show any amount of ineptitude, I will either make a fool of myself or get fired. Neither is an appealing option to me.

As for my writing, I’ve been working on something that I started when I was home for Christmas. It was actually the first project I started on in years, and I began it because I needed to work out some things in my head while I was feeling very overwhelmed about my life. This was the time period when I hadn’t really settled at all into a life here in Portland, I was in a failing relationship, and I was visiting home (and my family, whom I missed desperately). There was a lot of chaotic stuff going on in my head and my heart. Add to that the fact that I had never really dealt with all the things that happened to me in the year leading up to that… Well, I was pretty much a mess. So I started writing this sort of fictionalized account of what I went through, and I stopped after about 15 pages. I felt like I’d written enough and had said what I wanted to say at the time, and it let me move on to other things. Well, the other day I sat down and this just started pouring out, and now I’m up to about 40 pages. That’s the most I’ve ever written for something — my longest short story to date was about 20 pages. I’ve started entertaining the idea of taking this all the way to being a novel. I showed it to a friend (and fellow writer), who said she was blown away by it, so that made me feel a little better.

The problem, though, with showing friends and family your work… Well, there are a couple of problems. First, there’s the obvious: you don’t want to hurt any feelings. I don’t think there’s anything offensive in this particular thing I’m working on, although I think it might still be painful for people who love me to read it (because it ties so closely to what I went through). The second problem is that you can’t really trust friends and family to give you an honest opinion. They care about you, they love you, they want to encourage you. These are all good things, of course! They just don’t lend themselves to a really objective response. So I’m hesitant about showing it to anyone just yet. I’m going to keep working on it and see where it goes.

I guess that’s it. I think this is the longest bit I’ve written here, which is a little ironic considering I started out saying I didn’t have anything to say. Alas. So I leave you with e.e. cummings:

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

(listening to: Brenda Weiler, “Bold”)

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all of our kisses must come to an end sometime, but it’s always your lips pulling away from mine

I was lost in thought earlier and a sudden realization jarred me out of it: I haven’t heard thunder in months. I can’t remember the last time I heard thunder. Normally, back home, we’d be getting into prime thunderstorm season right about now. Here in Portland, there is no thunder. The rain is not insistent, or forceful. It comes and it goes, and if you don’t listen for its gentle drumming or get caught outside in it, you would never know it’s there at all.

I miss thunder.

I’ve been keeping myself busy lately. Work meetings and assignments, schoolwork, writing, reading. Endless reading. I have a stack of books from the library that I am slowly wading through. Several volumes of poetry: Charles Baudelaire, Federico García Lorca, e.e. cummings, Pablo Neruda. I force myself to read the French and Spanish poetry in its native tongue, and then I read the translations. I find I prefer the originals. My French vocabulary is much more limited than my Spanish, so the line there is a bit blurred. With Lorca and Neruda, though, I read the Spanish and I understand the tremendous value of understanding the words as they were intended to be written. It’s disappointing to read translations that are heavily inflected with the translator’s intentions, or their interpretation of the author’s intentions. It seems all wrong to me.

I’ve heard (or read) many authors say the key to writing is reading. William Faulkner said:

“Read, read, read. Read everything– trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”

I’m fairly certain it’s true. And I find that the more I read, the more I want to write. I used to reject this as a viable approach to writing because I thought that it would invariably amount to plagiarism, whether intentional or not. It’s not that way, though, at least not for me. Reading what someone writes starts a train of thought, and that train takes off on its own to some distant locale. My biggest problem is that I don’t map the routes closely enough. It’s a bit unsettling to arrive in a foreign city without knowing quite where you are or how you got there, you see.

Aside from writing fiction, I recently found out that I’ll be interviewing one of my favourite singer/songwriters for a lit/culture magazine I work on at school. The odd part is that I took the initiative and made it happen for myself. I contacted the press manager for the guy I wanted to interview, and sold her on the idea, and then contacted my editor and sold her on the idea. Now sometime in the next two weeks it’s all going to come together and I have to remember to breathe. (To my family: if you’re curious, I will give you the actual details privately, otherwise I’ll probably write about it more once it actually has happened.)

Sometimes I’m baffled by just how much growing up I’m doing and have yet to do. It seems very wrong that I should be 25 years old and just realizing for the first time that I really can do anything I set my mind to. And, very timidly, I am setting my mind to things. Fear of failure still grips my heart at times but, with practice, it’s getting easier to ignore. Slowly but surely, I am mastering the art.

And last but not least: hoppy Easter!

(listening to: Trespassers William, “Love You More”)

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i gave myself up to the dawning, of the morning bird in first flight

I’m finding more and more that writing a novel is a much greater undertaking than I had ever anticipated. In my youthful naïveté, I always assumed that, if — or when, if I’m being honest — it was “time” for me to write my great work of fiction, it would just come naturally to me. Every one of the award-winning pieces I wrote in high school was something that came out of me effortlessly. At the time, I took this to mean that the things everyone kept telling me were true: that I was a naturally gifted writer and I was destined for greatness. My hubris in that era was unmatched, to be sure.

After high school, a series of events led to the shattering of that confidence in myself and my writing. Looking back, I can’t even name one specific thing that caused it — it was simply an accumulation of catastrophes and debris that added up to more than I was willing or able to handle. I stopped writing fiction. I journaled extensively, as I always have done and probably always will do, but there’s a very extreme difference between journaling privately to clear your mind and producing fiction to publicly share with the world. The process and the results, for me, are in such stark contrast with one another that there can be no comparison. Despite my knee-jerk reaction to claim otherwise, this “creative muscle” is something that needs to be exercised, or else it atrophies. And that’s just what mine did.

It’s true that I never stopped getting ideas. They became fewer and farther between, but there were some that I could never silence. When I go through my journals and old boxes of junk, I can find any number of sidebar annotations or sticky notes with ideas scribbled onto them. Lines that had popped into my mind that I didn’t want to lose, or concepts that hung around persistently enough that I felt obligated to document them, things like that. Not necessarily anything I’ll really ever use, but remnants and fragments of that little voice’s struggle to break free.

Even with the bits and pieces, though, I worked hard to ignore it. I held steadfast in my belief that there was no point to me entertaining daydreams of being a writer, because it was not truly a viable option for me. I still don’t know if it is, honestly. It’s a big world out there, with a lot of unique and creative voices clamoring to be heard, and I have no way of knowing if mine is one that can set itself apart from the rest. What I do know, however, is that fighting against it is a losing battle. In the end, all the denial brings me is misery and self-doubt. Oddly enough, writing brings me those things too — but it also brings me a thrill, a joy that I have yet to find in other endeavours. If I’m to be miserable and doubt myself, I may as well do it while pursuing something I love.

So here I am. I started with an idea, a little blip of a scenario in my mind that made me think, Huh, I wonder what happens next. That made me think about it some more, which led to lots of frantic note scribbling on the bus, which led to hours in the library with my nose buried in my notebook, and so forth. Yet for all the flooding of ideas, I’m still faced with an exceedingly daunting task. I have to turn all these ideas into a coherent body of language that can be accessible to someone other than myself. When I look at these notecards and scraps of receipts with ink all over them, I feel a bit like I’m facing the impossible.

Suddenly I find myself understanding every bit of advice I ever got from published authors. The key point they drove home over and over was this: finish the book. The worries of submitting queries, finding an agent, and ideally getting published are all very secondary to this Herculean charge. At this point, I feel like my greatest accomplishment will simply be finishing a first draft of the completed novel. Anything beyond that seems more than I could hope for.

And now, back to the proverbial drawing board…

(listening to: Bobby Long, “Being a Mockingbird”)

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waving goodbye is so hard without hello

This courtyard is on campus at school downtown. The trees that have been fervently blossoming despite the few days of sunshine we’ve had are starting to shed their blooms. The ground is littered with tiny petals, and it looks like a pink snow is dusting the ground. I couldn’t help but sit and admire it for a bit.

Today in my fiction class, my teacher said something I found endlessly amusing:

“Say you move a scene of your story, and you had rain over here and sun over here. So you move it, and now you have to go through and move all the rain and all the sun. And you’re like, ‘Ugh! So stupid! I’m not doing this anymore!’ And then you go back to writing essays, because essays don’t have weather.”

That’s a pretty good summary of what “creative writing” feels like sometimes.

Also, I found a good quote the other day in a book on fiction writing that I was browsing through for tips on motivation and overcoming mental blocks. The quote specifically addresses my problem with writing. Barbara Kingsolver says:

“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you, figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”

Everything I write, I write with a voice of fear somewhere in my mind. Will what I write be any good? Will anyone want to read it? Will it offend my family? Will it disappoint my parents? Is there something else I should be saying instead? I have to learn to turn that voice off. You’d think it would be easy to simply say I’m writing this without plans to show it to anyone and then write whatever I want, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Must work on this.

I stopped at the Goodwill store a few blocks from my house today and bought some books:
· Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling) — I bought this because I watched the Goblet of Fire movie recently (out of curiosity about something unrelated to anything Harry Potter) and liked it enough to be curious about the series. I read the first book and hated it, but I keep getting told the later books are much better, so I’m going to give it a go again.
· Eat Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert) — I’ve been meaning to read this since it came out.
· Either/Or (Søren Kierkegaard) — An old favourite/classic that I simply had to have.
· Atonement (Ian McEwan) — I got the movie recently and decided I’d better read the book first, since I wanted to read it anyway.
· The BFG (Roald Dahl) — A childhood favourite, and it has an inscription in the front cover from someone’s teacher: “May your days be filled with the joy of books and reading. Merry Christmas, Mrs. Bolz.” I HAD to buy it.
· Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood) — One I’ve read before, but the last of her books I didn’t already own for some reason I don’t know.
· A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking) — Because my copy got absorbed by an ex somewhere along the line and this is a book I cannot live without having in my collection.
· Frommer’s Portable Portland — I figured this could be extremely useful for me to have, and at $0.99 it was quite a bargain.

It was a very good haul for not much money. I almost bought a copy of Wuthering Heights, but I didn’t because the copy they had smelled weird. I wonder why some old books smell wonderful, and some old books just smell like vomit? Unpleasant.

I got into a discussion with a friend earlier about used books. I’m a bit odd about them, because I really enjoy them quite a lot, but I also prefer to have my own, fresh copies of books. When I read a book for the first time, I don’t want any outside influences — I want to read the book with fresh eyes, a fresh mind, and make my own conclusions. I also have kind of an OCD thing about keeping my books crisp and clean, even though my heart warms at the sight of a battered, well-loved book. With used books, though, as long as I’ve read them already… I love to see the notes people make, or the parts they underlined, or the inscriptions put into covers with love. There’s so much history in a book. When I pick up an old book, either in a used bookstore or the library or wherever, I can’t help but wonder — who held this book before me? What thoughts did they have reading it? Did they stop at this page and lay the book down and sigh, just like I did? Why is this page dog-eared? So many questions, so many possibilities. I find great comfort in old, musty tomes. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to have my own musty tomes out there, bringing comfort to someone else. Maybe someday…

And in case anyone is curious or hasn’t figured it out yet… The titles on my entries are always lines from the song that’s named at the end of the entry. It’s an old habit I can’t seem to break.

(listening to: Matt Wertz, “Falling Off the Face of the Earth”)

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everything about you is so easy to love

(I wrote this originally somewhere else and decided to post it here, hence the lack of capitalization or emphasis on proper grammar & structure. Forgive me!)

so i initially decided to take this writing course because i wanted something that was going to force me to write. if i don’t have some kind of deadline over my head, i will procrastinate endlessly. in the case of my writing, eventually i either can’t contain it anymore, or the idea leaves me forever. i think i’ve lost a lot of ideas over the years, but i’m okay with that because i’m fairly convinced i don’t have very many good ideas.

so far, i’ve been rewarded with pleasant surprises from assignments for the class. i’ve had an idea for a story (or book, dunno) i’ve been wanting to write. in this idea, there is a boy and a girl, and a love story. there is also mental illness and art and sacrifice and heartbreak. all very commonplace themes, so i don’t know that the idea will ever be anything worth sharing, but these two characters have basically forced me to fall in love with them and they want their story written. however, i didn’t know what their story was, exactly. i knew what happened in it, but i didn’t know how or why, or much about the characters besides their essences with which i fell in love.

the first surprise was when the teacher assigned us the task of writing a completely bare-bones dialogue. we weren’t even allowed to use phrasing tags. it had to simply be,

“blah blah blah.”
“blah blah blah.”

and so on and so forth. i’m terrible at dialogue, though, so this assignment made me queasy. when i sat down to do it, i didn’t know what the conversation was going to be, or even who would be having it. once i started typing, though, it immediately became obvious that this was a conversation between my two lovers. lo and behold, by the end of two pages of dialogue, i had written out their first meeting.

the second surprise came to me today in class. i’m a very stubborn writer, in that i instinctively reject writing exercises or prompts, or anything that seems to be inorganic to my process. the teacher told us that we needed to flesh out the scene we’d written with our dialogue, so first he had us focus on setting. we had two minutes where we had to write down every noun we could think of in the scene. he said we weren’t allowed to stop writing at all, even if it meant we were writing “i don’t know” over and over. as i was writing, i was trying to picture what would be in the scene with my two lovers, of course, and all the initial things i thought would be there were, indeed, there. then something i hadn’t seen before popped into my head, and suddenly i had a new layer to the male character in the story. i actually learned something vital about him by picturing what he would have had with him in the scene.

my teacher said, “well, i think we found the cure to your writer’s block. we just have to force you to write.”

i’m a little scared, though, to be honest. in class we talked about how we, as students, are taught to exercise and strengthen our critical thinking. as students of literature, we hone our critical skills further, learning to analyze and break down every aspect of a piece of writing. now, turn us loose and tell us to write something of our own. the critical mind is going to be berating the creative voice all the while. this goes double for me because my critical voice is something that gets applied to everything i do.

i don’t know if i can turn these two lovers into people that anyone besides me will care about. i don’t know if their story will be something that other people will enjoy reading. there won’t be a happy ending for them — i already know how the story ends, i just don’t know completely what happens in the middle. i’m going to try, though, to write them as honestly as i can, and just hope that i do them justice, and that they each are someone that a reader will grow to love as much as i do.

(listening to: Muse, “Bliss”)

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i’ll guard your heart, with quiet words i’ll lead you in

This is one of my favourite PostSecret secrets ever, and that’s saying a lot given how much I love that site.

I need to force myself to overcome the idea that everything I write must be worth publishing or else there’s no point to my writing it. I want to once again be someone who writes because it makes her violently, passionately happy. I don’t want to be someone who is writing because she wants to be a published author.

I can feel them in me — the words I want to say, to write. I know they’re there, I just don’t know what they sound like yet. I was sitting on the bench waiting for my bus earlier and was struck with the image of the Operation game I played as a child. I can see the book, its square shape visible through the hole in my gut. Yet, every time I reach inside to pull it out, I am shocked by the electrical current of my clumsy error. I worry that I’ll never steady my hand enough to successully extricate it.

And then there’s the panic that I have nothing worthwhile to say — that it’s not original enough, not interesting enough, that no one will want to read it.

I want to get all these concerns and worries out of my mind and just write. Every now and again it comes out uncontrollably. I hole myself up in the library at school on a rainy day and somehow churn out a few handwritten pages, and I feel dizzy afterwards.

But it’s not enough.

(listening to: Anberlin, “The Unwinding Cable Car”)

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