Stagnant

Why Claire Disappeared for a bit

Note: This chapter was initially written as part of my wattpad block party feature piece. I decided, however, that the tone of it would not suit the event happening. I will be featured in the Feb edition of this year's block party (which I hope you will enjoy!), but I think this will have to go in here instead. 'Stagnant' has always stayed on my profile because it is truly like a diary to me.

In my post, I made references to 'a vlog'. Said vlog will be available in Feb along with my post in which I recorded my life on camera during the few days when I was writing chapter four of 'They Are Made From Lightning' (as found on my profile).  The post features excerpts of the chapter that I was writing, and little tips along the way.

This, however, gives a little more insight to what's been going on in my life in 2017, seeing as I was pretty quiet on Wattpad.

Enjoy <3

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I wanted to vlog me writing this chapter because I wanted people (readers and writers alike) to see that the writing process is not a streamlined one. It's not sitting down on a chair for 6 hours and smashing out a great banger of a chapter.

Instead, writing is a much more feral process. Writing is a beast that you have to tackle, step by step, day by day. But when the chapter is done, when the story is done, you have the tangible form of the splintered, drifting thoughts and planning.

I have struggled with finishing stories a lot. I've had dozens of uncompleted stories, and only one full, completed novel (that I wrote years ago and we will pretend doesn't exist, thank you).

And so, I left Wattpad hanging for a few months last year.

It gave me time to reconnect, re-evaluate. I took a creative writing unit in university, completely dropped writing for a while to try to figure out what the problem was.

And boiiiii, did it turn from a writing problem into a life problem.

I began to realise that I was itching to write during my break – so it wasn't that I'd lost my love for writing stories and using words and being emotional and torturing characters. Because frankly, that's a lot of the joy of writing.

So what was the problem?

From my vlog, you can see that I took 3 days (out of my holiday, mind you) to finish writing just a 1800 word chapter. I am a very slow writer. And 3 days is quite the achievement for me, considering that before I did some soul searching, I would take a full week (all dedicated to writing) to finish a single chapter. Frankly, watching some authors smash out 3000 word chapters is nothing short of watching a miracle for me. My process begins with me re-evaluating my writing, picking out every word, meticulously stringing sentences and syntaxes together.

I found that I usually got exhausted from being immersed in a single chapter for such a long period of time just to get it done.

This realisation did not feel pivotal at the time, it hardly felt like I'd discovered anything new. Instead, it felt like discovering the plant of the problem, but not knowing where the root of it was.

This is where the problem rotates from being a writing problem to being a life crisis.

People write for a myriad of reasons, but I write usually as an emotional channel. I write because I fragment parts of myself and lend them to the characters that I craft. I connect best to stories when they're just a part of me, made figurative. It's not the physical things that I put my characters through that I can connect with – it's all in the emotional landscape.

And I was having quite an emotionally charged year in 2017. I was in a constant state of anxiety, turmoil.

The cherry on top was that even I hadn't realised how bad it'd gotten. I was the desert of all my writing. Uninspired, unmotivated. Pulled out dry humour every day to deal with it.

I will not mention all the emotional obstacles that I had to overcome, because that oversteps personal boundaries, but problems were partially intrinsic – my perspective on life, my outlook on things, and the way I was treating myself.

Nevertheless, it was nothing short of a jungle of problems.

And that's the thing I realised. The more emotionally unsettled I am, the more incoherent my feelings are to me, and the more painful it is to try to translate the feelings into my stories. This makes the writing process further string out – I am trying to write stories, fill my mind with a character's thoughts when my own mind is already populated by people and things that I cannot tackle.

It's a vicious cycle of being unable to write, being unhappy with that, and letting that further constrict my writing.

There was only one solution.

Remember that creative writing unit that I mentioned I took in 2017? For my end of semester folio piece, I just wrote a huge surrealist analogy about all of my emotional struggle.

It was the most painful, meditative, reflective, rejuvenating thing that I have ever written. I would love to post it on Wattpad except it contains actual, direct references to my life and all my memories. I cried a few times writing it, because it was like unravelling something that had been knotted inside of me. Like revealing a rotting corpse from inside of me.

It caused an avalanche of emotional healing. I began to care more for my mental health.

That was the best decision I made in 2017. I did things for me, I started making decisions with my own sanity in mind.

So, as you can probably see, writing has not been something static in my life. Something that has been a mere hobby, something to do when I'm free. Writing has evolved into this force in my life that made me realise things about myself, about others, about the world. It is dynamic – changing, ricocheting off me.

It's 2018, and I can't wait to see where it takes me next.