I Swear I Can Write

Why We Write

You know what I really hate about my writing? It's that when I've got the best lines and ideas spilling out of my neurons, there's no paper around to pour them into. And it's almost always when I'm lying awake in bed, unable to sleep.

I hadn't been writing for a while because I'd been having some trouble in my head figuring things out. You know when you're caught up in a certain motion and then suddenly it all stops, but inertia pushes you on so you fall on your face? It was something like that. And the right thing to do would be to get up, dust off your pants and then find something else to do.
But me? I just sort of crawled over to the next moving thing, fell on my face when that stopped, and then to the next. Till I got to the point where there were no moving things close by, and I looked down at myself and I realized, 'Damn, I'm a mess.'

How's that for a description?

What all that anime-like storytelling means is, I got too immersed into just doing things to finish them so that I felt like I was achieving things. So much so, I forgot why I started them in the first place. And then I remembered; at which point I had to question myself if those endeavours were really the best use of my time. One of those things being my writing.

You see, I realized something when I finally changed out of my ripped pants, and got my broken nose looked at. It's something I wouldn't have put here had I not sat down with myself and really thought about it. Because it's not what people roaming around Wattpad are looking for, it's not what's going to earn me any votes.
But I started writing here to get my oddball's voice out, what's the point of continuing writing here if I'm not going to be honest with myself?

You know, there was a time I thought about writing one those horrid romance stories just so I could sell. I mean, yes, my writing's pretty rubbish, but ho, ho, ho, have you READ the kind of trash people write and get millions of reads? I could do that! But I could never get myself to betray me like that, man.

So yeah, let me tell you what I realized amid my multifaceted identity crisis, and I'll quote it from where I originally wrote it down: (yes, I talk to my self using the pronouns 'you' and 'us/we')

"... [My name], you are going to die, and when you wake up finally, it won't matter to you which sports you played, which friends you had, how many books you read and wrote. What will matter is how close you got to the Only One Who can protect you that day.

It won't matter that today you feel a bit strange about yourself, that you don't even like the things you admire. I love tennis and Angie and Naomi and Ash and Sakkari [names of tennis players] but... come on, I don't actually do. And I do not need to, nor do I need to tell people I do, as if it's some kind of cool personality trait. I'm not plain, and neither am I boring. Just my taste is chill. And that's ok.

Look, lass. We have work to do. Because we are going to die. And when we wake for the last time, we'll only regret all the comfort we amassed, and the time we spent behind idiots who never gave a jack about us."

(Yikes, that sounded much better in my personal writing space)

All kinds of tangents in there flying out in every direction. But the point I'm getting at is, I really had to think about why I write.

Why me? After all, everyone and their grandma has some book or something they're trying to write. One of my earlier chapters here says I write to share my story. Well, newsflash, living-under-a-rock-miss-lacabra, we have Instagram now. And Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and whatnot. Writing's outdated.
What's more is that you can write anything, forget write--you can just record an audio narration, send it to an editor and have it come out looking like a New York Time's bestseller. What is the point of MY writing?

I'm no Elon Musk haha, what's to write in my story?
...
But! I can't not write. I've been writing since I learned to hold a pencil. I still have some of my old writings. Believe it or not, they're even worse than what I write like now. But that didn't stop me then, haha! I kept writing. My thoughts go out to all the poor English teachers who've had to read them.

So, here's my guess: Some of us writers, who aren't Elons or Bills or Steves, and nor do we conjure up stories like Rowling or Card, I think we write cos, while we see the same things as everyone else, and sense another dimension to them (like many others can do also), we can find the words to express them. So we appreciate them, and we don't forget them. So we write about them. (Or maybe it's just me, and everyone else has brilliant stories to tell.)

I always aimed to write something with a message for everyone. But I just got really tired thinking about what would work for everyone. Honestly, I got myself in thought-knots all the time, contradicting myself and being left confused. So, I've started writing about what works for me, and maybe people reading along can look for bits of themselves between the paragraphs.

And maybe you're thinking now, 'Well, yes genius, that's how communication works.' then I must congratulate you for your superior understanding of how this world works. But excuse me if I feel I have a more meaningful understanding of it, now that I've gone through the frustrations of not knowing.

I don't know if any of the above made sense, but here's to let you know that I'm still writing. And I aim to be more deliberate in my life, in the things I do, and likewise in my writing.

Thank you ever so much for reading this far. Especially this chapter was hard to write for me, cos the ideas are so abstract I had difficulty finding the right words. And also, I've got the concentration of a three-year-old, staying on task is a bit harder for me than it is perhaps for other people haha.

AND, if it's not too much to ask, I'd love to read about your reason for writing (if you do), so please drop me a two-line comment about that if you can!