Do you remember learning how to write? I do. I remember sitting in a small desk, my mom next to me, as she patiently taught me how to form letter after letter. I remember elementary school when my teachers would make us write letters over and over again, slowly progressing to words and sentences until we got the hang of it. Back then, a fascination for letters, for words, and for writing began. Some years later, when my sister gifted me “The Chronicles of Narnia,” I also started falling in love with reading, though at the time I didn’t know it yet.
It took me many years afterward, and reading the “Inkheart” trilogy, to realize that I was madly in love with words and what we can express through them. I was in middle school back then, and just starting to write a journal. Eventually, that led me to write my own stories, nothing big although not insignificant. They were simple things, mainly shared with friends and the occasional teacher. I wasn’t any good, in my opinion, but my friends seemed to think that I was. It was good motivation, if I’ll be honest. Now, fast-forward to high school and several big changes in my life later, I completely stopped. Where I used to write almost religiously, I now simply read books, short stories, non-fiction, anything I could get my hands on, I read and lost myself in worlds of ink and paper, but that was it.
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Now, as a college student, I find myself wanting to write again. In all honesty, I miss it. I miss the ease with which words flowed, how natural it seemed to sit down with pen and paper and just write. You see, even though I stopped writing, I never stopped daydreaming. In a day, I can put together a simple story in my head, trash it, and immediately make a new one over and over. In my head, characters, stories, and worlds of fantasy come to life effortlessly. Yet, the moment I attempt to put words to paper, to describe the things in my head, I blank out. It’s like I forget the letters, the words. They’re still there, but my inability to bring them to life, to give the worlds in my head color and form, to make them something slightly more tangible is frustrating, to say the least. Thus, I stop trying, again.
So how do I write? Well, I sit down and force myself to do it. It’s not easy, but, to an extent, it works. In all honesty, when I set out to write this piece, it was absolutely nothing like this. When I started writing, it was a piece about short stories, but it just didn’t feel right. This, on the other hand, flowed almost seamlessly. I’ve been thinking a lot on why writing has become so difficult for me. Is it something that happens to all imaginative minds? Do we all simply “zone out” while trying to form a world we create and enjoy? People approach the creative process in a large variety of ways, some use music to fuel their thoughts, others draw inspiration from prompts or art pieces, others research and then some discuss meaningful subjects with people in their everyday lives and let their minds run wild.
So how do you push yourself to write? You don’t, not always, sometimes it comes naturally, it just flows. Other times you have to sit down, fight yourself, become frustrated and struggle to find the words. But the good thing is that, whichever the case may be, you eventually write, and the message you send is what matters.
