I've been thinking a lot about my writing the past six months, and I've come to realize a couple of things.
Particularly, I never wanted to be a writer as a kid. I dreamed of more practical occupations (
doctor, to fix my mother;
mayor, to fix my town;
fighter pilot, to save everyone). Two cousins very close to me growing up wanted nothing more than to sit at their typewriters and dream of being Lois Lanes at the tender ages of five and six, but words and I had a different relationship. I had great difficulty reading as a child, so words couldn't be captured at those matching typewriters. Couldn't be captured like that.
I couldn't be like that. Words, to me, all came down to music.
I've always had a powerful connection to music, particularly to lyrics. Words to me are breath, spirit,
alive-- not dead marks on cheap paper. I fancied myself a song writer at the age of five, scribbling lines and lyrics on napkins and table clothes and walls, anything that would hold the clever sounds I transformed into a pretty string for all to admire. When i moved to Oregon and fell in a group of aspiring writers, I was always the one on the edge; I was no writer, I protested, that was everyone else. I was just the one humming my words as I tossed them into jagged lines of poetry. Even in high school, when I won a spot in a state writing challenge four years in a row, I never thought myself one of
them. When I fell into fanfiction, it was never about
transforming, just a way to get the words out, feelings I could no longer feel comfortable speaking into existence, releasing the pressures on my soul so that I may continue on, unburdened.
Events conspired in college, ones that firmly set me in the path of becoming a writer. I could no longer write verse, the words of a harsh professor ripping the verse from my mouth. Poetry had been my breath and I allowed myself to asphyxiate. But I fell into fanfiction and roleplaying and Nanowrimo, and somehow, words
changed. They became fixed creatures, black strokes etched deeply into white canvas. I never noticed that my best writing always came when I voiced out the scene as I tapped out the words, unconsciously stringing those pretty words together much as I had as a child, as a teen, as a poet.
But I ceased this habit after college and my connection to the words fell. The fast few years have been a struggle to get the words out. To sit down and let anything come out but frustration and garbled, misshapen words barely hanging together coherently. There was no craft to any of it, just anger and pain and the realization that this is not worth it, that I can no longer say that I am a writer, that I have failed. That this is better done by everyone else but me so what is the point?
I thought a great deal about giving up writing in 2012. Then Yuletide happened, and as the last night of writing transitioned from one of the worst experiences with writing I've ever had to me lurching over the keyboard at 3am, whispering the lovely lines my mind was finally giving me, stringing together words that I could be proud of once reveals came, it came back to me why I started writing again. Why I came to love it and find so much value in it.
I'm never going to be someone who writes to become Lois Lane, to change the world from their typewriter. I use this medium to make a song out of paper, to use the words as instruments to make the reader feel what drives me, to connect in the same way music and life has connected with me. I never managed to create my own song with any of the instruments I tootled with over the years, but damned if I haven't created one hell of a playlist with my words.
cheerful