I Declare This Journal To Be On Hiatus For a Presently Undetermined Amount of Time
Writing came as naturally as breathing to her, often at the most inconvenient times: an itch in her fingers and a tangled mess of thoughts as she battled variations of anxiety-born insomnia, a way to bring order to the words that somersaulted in her mind, tripping and tumbling over one another in a seething mass. When inspiration struck, it became an addiction: an all-consuming need that occupied every thought. When bereft, the lack of it made the once-simple act utterly impossible. Words that once flowed like water through her fingers now had to be forced into existence with the pain of pulling teeth: never quite hitting the right note, conveying the wrong meaning, tasting bitter and strange when its syllables tickled the tongue. Writing was an effort to assign meaning to emotions that she could not understand, and form to the abstract of her thoughts. Once named, it could be understood. Once confined to a physical form, it could be overcome: an unorthodox application of “know your enemy”.
She found it strange that she rarely wrote in the first person. The usage of I seemed too self-important, too arrogant for her purposes, as though she fought to force her thinking on the rest of the world, as if the world ought to give a damn about someone like her. To say that I want seemed selfish, I feel seemed foolish, I itself too internal, too much like the realm of her emotional mind of which she sought to make sense. To say that she had these thoughts placed them outside her, distanced her from their emotional meaning, allowed for rationality and a semblance of anonymity. To speak of these things as though they came from the mind of another person made them seem more truthful and less egotistical, more human and less like the word of God.
The written word allowed her to be eloquent in a way the spoken word never could. Words that she would have freely used in writing sounded utterly preposterous when curled around the tongue of her pouting mouth, stuttered out in that shy shadow of a voice that betrayed her youth. Writing forced her to think in clearly directed sentences, a process directly at odds with her normally tangential thinking. When holding a conversation her mind moved at a mile a minute, hopping from one thought to the next like a nervous jackrabbit. Vocalizing them long before she had any idea what it was she was trying to say, or else keeping them locked up tight behind resolutely closed lips, lapsing into an uneasy silence.
The voice expressed in her writing was so unlike the patterns of her everyday speech that even reading the words aloud was difficult, choking her with its flowery formality. It wasn’t that she did it on purpose, that she strove to be so conflicting in her self-expression, but that her vocabulary had been shaped by the literature on which she was raised, fraught with archaic phrasing and long-winded sentences that sent modern grammar mechanics running. Indeed, it was the mechanics of her work with which she most often struggled, rather than its form. More often than not the ideas contained in a single draft remained more or less unchanged throughout the various revisions, while one with keener eyes than hers picked and poked and scribbled about in red pen for grammatical errors. Converting commas to periods every so often in order to cut short the sweeping sentences of which she was so fond. On the very rare occasions that a content overhaul was needed, it was far more likely that a good pruning was all that was required. Being a firm believer that any form of writing can only be written once, she did not mind, preferring an abundance of thoughts to a lack of them.
Because writing came so naturally to her, it had been more than once suggested that she make it her primary field of study. An idea which, sadly, her overly-practical mind was not inclined to entertain. Not only was she not fond of the looks that some of her less-than-tactful family members gave at the mere mention of the words ‘English Major’, but it also brought to mind the idea that she intended to become some great authoress. Something which, while completely and entirely false, was not something she fancied dealing with on a daily basis.
In truth, while she enjoyed writing immensely, and wasn’t half bad at it, she didn’t enjoy it for the reasons she ought to should she choose to make it her life. She didn’t write in order to create her own personal sandbox, a unique world complete with its own unique characters. She wrote to take the thoughts on characters created in the sandboxes of others and give them a voice, if only so that they would exist somewhere other than her head. She examined their motivations, their relationships, and their personalities. She wondered at various what-if’s left unanswered by their creators, filled gaps and made connections driven solely by a need to know, to understand the mechanics of their world, and to understand them, not only as real, living people, but as products of their creator’s imagination, an extension of the author who brought them into being. She writes in order to make sense of the world, whether real or imaginary, and the people that dwell within it. Most importantly, she writes to make sense of herself.
She found it strange that she rarely wrote in the first person. The usage of I seemed too self-important, too arrogant for her purposes, as though she fought to force her thinking on the rest of the world, as if the world ought to give a damn about someone like her. To say that I want seemed selfish, I feel seemed foolish, I itself too internal, too much like the realm of her emotional mind of which she sought to make sense. To say that she had these thoughts placed them outside her, distanced her from their emotional meaning, allowed for rationality and a semblance of anonymity. To speak of these things as though they came from the mind of another person made them seem more truthful and less egotistical, more human and less like the word of God.
The written word allowed her to be eloquent in a way the spoken word never could. Words that she would have freely used in writing sounded utterly preposterous when curled around the tongue of her pouting mouth, stuttered out in that shy shadow of a voice that betrayed her youth. Writing forced her to think in clearly directed sentences, a process directly at odds with her normally tangential thinking. When holding a conversation her mind moved at a mile a minute, hopping from one thought to the next like a nervous jackrabbit. Vocalizing them long before she had any idea what it was she was trying to say, or else keeping them locked up tight behind resolutely closed lips, lapsing into an uneasy silence.
The voice expressed in her writing was so unlike the patterns of her everyday speech that even reading the words aloud was difficult, choking her with its flowery formality. It wasn’t that she did it on purpose, that she strove to be so conflicting in her self-expression, but that her vocabulary had been shaped by the literature on which she was raised, fraught with archaic phrasing and long-winded sentences that sent modern grammar mechanics running. Indeed, it was the mechanics of her work with which she most often struggled, rather than its form. More often than not the ideas contained in a single draft remained more or less unchanged throughout the various revisions, while one with keener eyes than hers picked and poked and scribbled about in red pen for grammatical errors. Converting commas to periods every so often in order to cut short the sweeping sentences of which she was so fond. On the very rare occasions that a content overhaul was needed, it was far more likely that a good pruning was all that was required. Being a firm believer that any form of writing can only be written once, she did not mind, preferring an abundance of thoughts to a lack of them.
Because writing came so naturally to her, it had been more than once suggested that she make it her primary field of study. An idea which, sadly, her overly-practical mind was not inclined to entertain. Not only was she not fond of the looks that some of her less-than-tactful family members gave at the mere mention of the words ‘English Major’, but it also brought to mind the idea that she intended to become some great authoress. Something which, while completely and entirely false, was not something she fancied dealing with on a daily basis.
In truth, while she enjoyed writing immensely, and wasn’t half bad at it, she didn’t enjoy it for the reasons she ought to should she choose to make it her life. She didn’t write in order to create her own personal sandbox, a unique world complete with its own unique characters. She wrote to take the thoughts on characters created in the sandboxes of others and give them a voice, if only so that they would exist somewhere other than her head. She examined their motivations, their relationships, and their personalities. She wondered at various what-if’s left unanswered by their creators, filled gaps and made connections driven solely by a need to know, to understand the mechanics of their world, and to understand them, not only as real, living people, but as products of their creator’s imagination, an extension of the author who brought them into being. She writes in order to make sense of the world, whether real or imaginary, and the people that dwell within it. Most importantly, she writes to make sense of herself.