Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Jul 30, 2007

Thinking Out Loud: The hills are alive…

Filed in Writing

…with the sound of writing…

You all know Julia Andrews bursting into song with the classical music swelling up around her as the mountains look lovingly on. And some of you will even remember the hapless groom in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who doesn’t want “vast tracts of land”–he just wants to sing.

That’s what it’s like for me with writing. I was lying in bed reading and something triggered an idea and I had to get out of bed and spill. The words line up and hustle and form sentences and gather and wiggle and then they burst forth and are written. There are thousands, maybe millions, of them inside me waiting to be born. I can’t hold them in.

Sometimes I have panic attacks because there are so many different ideas whirling around my mind. Perhaps that is why Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. My mind is a whirlwind of thoughts and ideas and articles and blog posts. My mind compresses and I actually have to sit down and breathe. I worry most that there will not be time enough to write all that I have to write.

I have wasted a lot of time saying “I want to be a writer.” Thing is, I’ve always been a writer, ever since I was a little girl. One indulgent teacher let me fill exercise book after exercise book with stories instead of doing what the rest of the class was doing. What I really was saying was, “I want to write and make a living from it.” And there’s something fundamentally wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with making money from writing, I mean: what’s wrong is that this is the only supposed measure of success there for writers. What if success were measured by the fact that today you actually wrote something down, shared a piece of yourself, even if the only person you shared it with was yourself? What if success were measured by whether you let your muse out to play?

I need to write and write and let those pushy little words have their wicked way with my pencil, pen, typewriter and keyboard. I find that the more I write, the more the writing comes out. Creativity begets creativity. And the more I write the better I get, because in this case practice makes perfect. Intuitively things slide into place and I know which word to choose and which to cut.

Part of being a writer is letting go of perfection and even of being good. If you do that, there’s room for possibility and improvement. Learning is subconscious! It seeps into you when you’re off cooking dinner, watching TV or feeding the cat. Learning is always there, waiting for you to let it in, like reverse leaking. Perfectionism is a wall against learning and expanding one’s barriers. It’s a great excuse to not progress any further because, well, going with the flow is frightening. Wow, no control!

People don’t like that, apparently.

Sitting around wanting to write doesn’t help. Complaining about not “being able” to write doesn’t help. The only thing that helps you to be able to write is writing. Even if the output is ultimately something so dismal you’d never share it with another person (you should see some of my poems from the Nineties) it got written. With the dismal stuff out of the way, there’s room for something else.

If you blog, you’re a writer. If you write brochures for a company, you’re a writer. If you write letters…well, you get the picture.

I think last weekend’s Blogathon has opened up a door (or a floodgate). It reminded me to Just Write. Not having the time to go back and edit and nit-pick over where the commas go is refreshing and soothing even if the actual physical act of exhausting oneself writing is not. Instead of trying to classify everything I am relaxing and starting to go with the flow. I am brewing questions regarding what I want to do with my blog and where it fits in and where I do, too. And I begin to realize that the pieces will fall into place. In my mind the cogs of change are already scheming and whirring. I feel as though my world is brimming with possibility.

It is a wonderful, exciting, brilliant feeling.