Aristotle wrote, "It is impossible that anything should be produced if there were nothing existing before." Everything written has come from someone's experience and reflection of that experience. From memories and remembered feelings life is replicated in short stories, poems, novellas
and novels. The planets align, jungles flourish, gardens bloom, farms produce and the seas overflow with life. People are reading your work and you are in every word.
Each person has a story to tell. A story of possibilities some fulfilled and some decaying within us. Everything we do comes from within. We interpret the world as we feel it. If the world is aligning to hurt us we feel life circumstances from a position of pain. If the world has lined up to make us laugh then we feel the wealth of those in our life with joy. All of us, writers
and non-writers alike, feel the greatness of our lives and the lives of those around us. Whether or not we allow ourselves the capacity to feel the great goodness or the despair of selfishness or the darkness of hurting another soul unnecessarily we all have the same capacity to make choices.
Ingrid Bengis wrote ". . . the absence of love in our lives is what makes them seem raw and unfinished." "Them" in Bengis' quote is feelings without feelings in our lives we go unfinished as writers. The writer writes to finish, play out, fulfill feelings. The writer cannot endure raw and unfinished love, despair, fear, anger, joy, happiness or loneliness. We can only mull over feelings for so long before they have to come out. We write
what is naturally bothering us in the day.
Every time we feel the urge to write we have choices. The choice is always ours whether or not to write in our day. The choice of what we write about is also a choice we have. As we live and collect experience from days of mundane happy and painful living we create a formidable repertoire of circumstances, experiences and feelings to use as material for our writing day.
Every writer has a pattern of responses that keep them away from the laptop or bring them to it day after day. We are comfortable in our patterns, we wallow in our ability to commit or not commit to writing those feelings and experiences hidden deep within us we are afraid to share. Whatever the habitual pattern is we have developed it saves us from the fear of sharing ourselves with total strangers. The discomfort of opening ourselves up and sharing our feelings is a risk we may or may not make, but the choice is ours.
Orinda said, ". . . my grief was too deeply rooted to be cured with words." As writers what do we get back from taking the risk of sharing our feelings and our lives with strangers; especially those strangers who call us son, daughter, aunt and friend. When we give up comfort to write how we feel we give up the distraction of spontaneity in our lives. We become disciplined in our actions, our routines, our thoughts of what to write consume us until we become so filled with the feeling of an experience we have to empty ourselves of it in order to move on to the next feeling and experience.
Our habits of how we write
has no room for spontaneity our life becomes planned. If I do this today then I have to make up for it tomorrow. What the world considers usual behavior is far removed from a writer's life. Writers navigate their writing moments to fit into the world of others. There is no automatic pilot for us we dictate our whole life either by avoiding writing or writing all the time.
and novels. The planets align, jungles flourish, gardens bloom, farms produce and the seas overflow with life. People are reading your work and you are in every word.Each person has a story to tell. A story of possibilities some fulfilled and some decaying within us. Everything we do comes from within. We interpret the world as we feel it. If the world is aligning to hurt us we feel life circumstances from a position of pain. If the world has lined up to make us laugh then we feel the wealth of those in our life with joy. All of us, writers
and non-writers alike, feel the greatness of our lives and the lives of those around us. Whether or not we allow ourselves the capacity to feel the great goodness or the despair of selfishness or the darkness of hurting another soul unnecessarily we all have the same capacity to make choices.Ingrid Bengis wrote ". . . the absence of love in our lives is what makes them seem raw and unfinished." "Them" in Bengis' quote is feelings without feelings in our lives we go unfinished as writers. The writer writes to finish, play out, fulfill feelings. The writer cannot endure raw and unfinished love, despair, fear, anger, joy, happiness or loneliness. We can only mull over feelings for so long before they have to come out. We write
what is naturally bothering us in the day. Every time we feel the urge to write we have choices. The choice is always ours whether or not to write in our day. The choice of what we write about is also a choice we have. As we live and collect experience from days of mundane happy and painful living we create a formidable repertoire of circumstances, experiences and feelings to use as material for our writing day.
Every writer has a pattern of responses that keep them away from the laptop or bring them to it day after day. We are comfortable in our patterns, we wallow in our ability to commit or not commit to writing those feelings and experiences hidden deep within us we are afraid to share. Whatever the habitual pattern is we have developed it saves us from the fear of sharing ourselves with total strangers. The discomfort of opening ourselves up and sharing our feelings is a risk we may or may not make, but the choice is ours.
Orinda said, ". . . my grief was too deeply rooted to be cured with words." As writers what do we get back from taking the risk of sharing our feelings and our lives with strangers; especially those strangers who call us son, daughter, aunt and friend. When we give up comfort to write how we feel we give up the distraction of spontaneity in our lives. We become disciplined in our actions, our routines, our thoughts of what to write consume us until we become so filled with the feeling of an experience we have to empty ourselves of it in order to move on to the next feeling and experience.
Our habits of how we write
has no room for spontaneity our life becomes planned. If I do this today then I have to make up for it tomorrow. What the world considers usual behavior is far removed from a writer's life. Writers navigate their writing moments to fit into the world of others. There is no automatic pilot for us we dictate our whole life either by avoiding writing or writing all the time. 
Tammy,
ReplyDeleteHow do you keep yourself inspired to write often? I find myself not wanting to or forgetting to write.
Hi Yzabel--I think it is easier for me b/c I make my living writing which means I write daily--I have to. It took years for me to feel like writing my blog and working on my novel was a worthy effort--I wasn't ready to not care what people thought of what I wrote--at the end of last year into this year I found a place in me b/c of a relationship where I became comfortable with me and so it didn't matter anymore what people thought after I click publish. It was when I stopped caring about what other people thought that my writing changed and I became free to be inspired to write often. I have taken a break the last couple of weeks to research some new material, but I am still writing every day. I never forget to write and not wanting to write is like not wanting to exercise--you just have to do "it"--"it" being write if you are going to call yourself a writer :) I hope this helped. Thanks for your question. Tammy
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