Why I Write: Part I

For the last few months, nearly a year in fact, I’ve been struggling like I never have before with my writing.  The months spent buried in my homework made sense.  I had to prioritize, and with three jobs and full time academics, my writing had to take a back seat.  However, I’ve had two months of “freedom” so to speak, and I have slowly come the realization that I am not making the progress I should be.  I’ve started three stories, finished none, and am currently staring at my open document in a desperate need to come up with a paltry 1,292 words to make my evening goal.  With my current struggles, I’ve had to open up a great many doors in my dark, twisted mind, and it hasn’t been a comforting find.  This leads me to today: to the need to realign with why I write.  This is part one, and I’ve decided I’ll just have to keep coming back until I can get myself back on track.

I remember the exact reason why I wrote my first story.  It was because I didn’t like the way a series I had read ended, so I wrote similar characters, but of my own creation, and ended it the way I thought it should.  Oddly enough, that story has morphed over the years to deviate from my original intention, but that was truly what moved me out of the realm of a few short stories with more beginnings than endings, and into the world of a writer.  I was eleven.  Now, nearly twenty years later, I have a library full of stories – characters of my imagination inspired by a variety of reasons who insisted on having their stories told.  In a way, I echoed the words of Toni Morrison and started as a writer because I wanted to read the tales of my own characters.

For so long, writer and creations were separate.  In a way, my characters were like the monster and I was Dr. Frankenstein (no – it’s pronounced Igor…but I digress).  But that all changed last September when I lost one of my dearest friends.  Suddenly, my outlets became personal.  I was no longer Frankenstein, but instead Dr. Jekyll and my Mr. Hydes have been less than cooperative.  I had to deal with decades of repressed emotions through the only outlet I had available – writing.  Creating Summer’s Boys was painful, but beautiful – and taught me more about myself than I had known.  However, it’s the middle of July now, and I find that I haven’t moved on like I should have.  I still struggle to keep the bleeding of creator and creation separate.  Additional personal loss hasn’t helped matters either.  I woke up, quite literally in the middle of night recently and realized that it didn’t matter what happened to me personally with those I’ve loved, I owed it to my current character to finish her story.  She was not a part of me.  I was a part of her.  So here I sit, working up the long uphill battle towards finding that balance again.  I can only hope that my writing will benefit, but I know I have a long way yet to go.

In the end, I hope that anyone who might read this will understand the feeling – that maybe you might share a touch of my suffering – and possibly, we might start that slow slog up the steep slope together.  Until we meet again…

Write On
L.E.