I’ve been looking to get back into writing. For a few years, it felt like I lost touch with what made it such a significant part of my life. I had stories to tell, but couldn’t find the place to start and couldn’t see why they wanted to be told to begin with. While I didn’t really stop writing, I found myself throwing spaghetti at the wall, just to see if it would stick.
Like many writers, I want to be engrossed in a large project that has meaning in my life. In sort of an odd way, I realized that while this is important to me, focusing on it created a white elephant, so to speak. At first it lurked in the corner, observing, but slowly, it moved its way across the room, until it stood wedged between me and my process.
This background noise acts as interference, often cropping up as doubt or a simple distraction–mostly as a reason to become distracted–that takes away from the stories I tell. Moving away from this is a challenge. What’s helping me now is to focus on… it’s hard to say, exactly, but to focus on writing in a way that resembles my thought process as I get the words out, even if that means keeping in mistakes or things that aren’t grammatically correct. Through that, what I’m writing becomes less important than the way I’m writing it, which should be without filter, and this gets rid of any room for overthinking.
After focusing on the process this way, the idea of sitting down to ‘write a book’ or short story, poem, anything with a predestined shape, became absurd to me. Limiting isn’t the right word for how I feel about doing that, but defining what a blank page is before it’s written feels like the wrong way to go about what I’m trying to get to, which is writing something true and meaningful to me and hopefully to others. In those beginning stages, writing should be amorphous and unclear, as it was before the first stories were put to page.
This is a topic I could go on forever about. It extends into my daily life, from the big decisions I make to the small, everyday tasks that are endlessly more important than the risky leaps that mistakenly take up all my time and mental space.
The really good, big things that have happened to me didn’t come from overthinking. They felt natural and instant. I didn’t think about making the choices that brought me to them. There’s no sense in worrying about those big goals or decisions. That ruins the process. In order to go well, those decisions need to feel seamless, almost as if they happened subconsciously.
It’s the small, everyday acts of certainty that have brought me the confidence and direction I’ve needed to tackle big decisions.
So, maybe I should just write words, lines, paragraphs, and pages instead of novels, poems, or short stories. People can call them what they want, as they will anyway. Of course, having a vague point in the distance can be helpful at times, but it’s important to focus on each step, each word, each stone that paves the way, instead of the end result.
This is how you find yourself in the place you were always meant to be.
