Writing When You Don’t Wanna: Reflection on the Past 120 Days

           If you’ve read this post, you’ll know that I’ve spent the past four months tricking myself into writing every day. I still use the word “tricking” because, although writing everyday has begun to feel a lot more natural and enjoyable, getting that checkmark has often been tiresome and painful. Not breaking the chain has meant writing at eleven o’clock in that borderline laughter-crying state college students have mastered. In the car on the way home from spending the day at my best friend’s school and I have about fifteen minutes to type something out on my phone that will probably make no sense because I’ve slept about three hours. But I’ve kept the chain going so far, and with each mark I have new motivation not to skip a day. This may be the first time during any academic year that I’ve managed to stay creatively grounded despite all my school stress. And all that is because I’ve learned to write even when I just don’t want to.

            Before this year, I fell into the mindset that many young writers have, that I shouldn’t write if I’m not feeling inspired. Writing without all consuming desire would just feel like dry heaving. All my efforts would produce would be dry prose that offends all literary decency by virtue of existence. So it’s better to not write and just keep watching the same episodes of Parks & Rec over and over again, right?

But I never really found the perfect moment to start. There was always some distraction, some anxiety, some looming responsibility that inhibited the creative mojo I wanted to just flow onto the page. As a result, I never wrote regularly, getting work done only in the summer when I was bored enough to finally open a Word Document.

I didn’t know that this isn’t how writing careers work. Fancy authors with their book deals and stuff are swathed with deadlines and contracts. Waiting for inspiration isn’t an option when your agent keeps calling. Authors still seem to deliver just as well, if not better, on their second and third books.

What I defined as Waiting for Inspiration was just repackaged pretentiousness and apprehension. Forcing myself to write every day required me to accept that all first drafts are crap, but crappy writing is better than no writing because at least I’ll have something to revise later. Inspiration isn’t something that falls at a person’s feet; one has to find it on their own.

A strange thing happens in the absence of inspiration. A writer has to take risks they would otherwise not take. I chose to write a coming of age story, a novel that takes place all in one night, because despite all the anxieties I have about those tropes, they are the best ideas I have right now. I’ll probably screw it up, but that’s okay. I can fix it tomorrow anyway.

So this is my advice, which will sound hypocritical since this is a whole blog post about thinking about writing as opposed to actually writing, but:

If you want to be a writer, then write already. Quit waiting. Quit thinking. Just write. Now.

Cloudy with a Chance of Existentialism: Taking the Weather Personally

         Spring has arrived and as usual, someone has forgotten to tell Minnesota. I came back from “spring” break to find a series of dark, cold days. Last Tuesday, I was sitting in my American Lit class, discussing representations of death and religion in Modernist poetry (yes, this is what I’ve dedicated my life too). I was understandably exhausted, it being the first day of class after break, and began to zone out, focusing instead on the barren tree outside the window.

I realized it was one of those days where the sky appeared to be perpetually trapped between dark and light. Wind howled against the glass. The florescent lights inside put up minimal effort, leaving the corners of the room dark and students’ faces shaded. All form a rather oppressive environment to be discussing how God is dead and one day you will be to.

            J.D. Salinger once wrote, “Poets are always taking the weather so personally.” I think this sentiment can apply to all writers. When you begin to set up your life as scenes to be observed and recorded, every phenomenon is viewed as contributing to the overall mood of your environment. This may sound ridiculous, but see if this feeling is familiar to you: A suddenly sunny day makes you feel like your Calculus test might actually go okay. Rain on a morning where your car wouldn’t start seems like adding insult to injury. The weather can start to appear like it’s designed to heighten whatever emotion you’re already wrestling with.

            Of course, there are mental disorders where the season can actually affect someone’s mood, causing depression at the same time each year. I do not suffer from that illness. I’m just a college student occasionally bored in class. But my gloom got me thinking, what if we responded to the changes in weather like literary characters did?

            What if when the summer became sweltering hot, you just knew your neighbor was going to end up murdered in a pool? What if you saw a few strange lightning strikes and started killing everybody (actually, I’m seeing a pattern of using nature to justify violence, whoops)? This is a literary device called the pathetic fallacy, which attributes human qualities and emotions to inanimate objects of nature. Weather is another way to set the tone, to convey eeriness or rage without having to explicitly state, “it was tense.” But imagine if that magical meteorological power came over real life and weather reports started to read like horoscopes that were actually accurate. Sunny with a chance of lost tempers. Cloudy with a chance of existential crisis. It would be fascinating for about a day, and then we would have to figure out what to do with all the bodies.

Which Came First: The Writer or the Narcissist?

           I consider watching Girls on HBO to be an educational, as well as spiritual, experience for me. Not only does the plot teach me how not to act as a young woman more than a little bit lost in her life (Note: Don’t pee in the street), but the main character, Hannah, teaches me how not to act as a writer. To quote the show’s unlikely voice of reason, Shoshanna, Hannah is a “F*cking narcissist. I’ve never met anyone else who thinks their own life is so f*cking fascinating.” In truth, Hannah’s relationship to her work leads to her believing she has a unique perspective on life that needs to be shared with the world.

            In reality, no one publishes a poem, novel, or blog post without the belief they have something the public needs to hear. The question is: is this belief self-confidence or narcissism? I know I’ve sat through enough cringe-inducing writing workshops, thinking, “God, is this what I sound like to other people?”

Does the process of writing, spending hours documenting and editing your own thoughts, make one a narcissist? Do only narcissists have the bravado to expose their thoughts to the world?

            Or neither?

For starters, most writers are internal processors, meaning that writing is their way of clearing out the mess in their head. In that sense, we don’t think about ourselves or analyze our emotions anymore than regular people. We just process in the more permanent way of documentation.

Writing (as well as reading) is a practice in empathy. When creating fiction, one has to imagine how another person would feel and react to a situation the writer may or may not have experienced before. When creating non-fiction, the writer has to find something in their observations that applies to more universal feelings. But yes, I am a little arrogant to think I can teach the world a lesson about the time I got my ears pierced and there was a guy in the parlor looking for genital accessories (I’ll tell that story later).

Furthermore, I resent the older generations simultaneous obsession with my generation’s exaggerated self-involvement and our low self-esteem. Don’t be a Hannah; accept criticism on your work, pay attention to perspectives other than your own. But acknowledge that you as a writer and a person have something to say. It’s the world's decision whether or not they want to listen.