Writing is always a love-hate process when it’s something that you genuinely enjoy. Any creative will tell you that the output of their creative endeavour—be it painting, knitting, dancing, anything—can rest heavily on your self-worth. That thing you’ve spent months toiling over and pouring your soul into? Better think it’s good. Otherwise, you feel as though you’ve not only wasted your time, but you’ve also maybe, terrifyingly, lost your touch with your craft, and I don’t think I need to explain how stressful that is.
Writing, however, is one of the few creative processes that has a place in academics. That might sound useful, and, yeah, I can’t deny that it is. Something that is so difficult for some people that they forgo entire classes or even degrees just to avoid doing is something that I not only enjoy, but get rewarded for doing with pretty good grades. Essay writing is a skill, a very important one, and it’s incredibly lucky that my personal interest in writing translates to an ease in one of the hardest practices of school.
There is a bad side to all this, though. When I was a kid, before high school hit, I would write constantly. It was my coping mechanism for a lot of the resentment I had in me. Whenever I was angry, I would write a poem or a speech about what thing made me heated and why, and then suddenly, I wasn’t angry anymore. It’s like my rage couldn’t eat at me from inside my mind, because there it was. On paper. In the real world and not just bouncing around in my skull, driving me crazy in isolation. It became easier to rationalize and bargain with now that I didn’t feel like it was pulling my brain apart, and it was in fact a very tangible issue that I could connect to others about and try to solve together.
So what happens when your coping mechanism becomes quantifiable? Suddenly, it wasn’t important that I was writing, it was important that my writing be good. Good enough to impress a teacher and coax them into giving me a single letter in response to the thousands I gave them. Now, the thing that I’ve been using as a pure form of self-expression became my ticket to a secure future (in the traditional sense; go to a good college, get a good job, blah blah blah), and its function as a comfort started to diminish to make way for this grand goal.
From the start of high school to my second year of university, I stopped writing for fun altogether. All of my creative energy went into academic essays. I found comfort in their arguments and research, found myself useful in the conclusions I drew about the world around me in those pages, but it wasn’t what brought me peace. It wasn’t the baleful tirades against the powers that be, backed up by my own experiences and knowledge rather than a great work or literature that someone else decided is important. Losing that part of me after relying on it for so long is like not realizing you’ve been clenching your jaw for the past seven years without relaxing once, and now you have stage one-million hypertension. All of this while I was convincing myself that clenching my jaw would somehow make my body stronger.
This is where I learned a very big lesson, one that other creatives may have thought to themselves upon reading the first paragraph of this piece; the creative process is just that, a process. If we put pressure on the outcome to be “good” then we lose joy in our craft on the path to creating an impossibly great piece. I’m not talking about working very hard on something only to be dissatisfied with the result. That’s a huge bummer and it always sucks when that happens. I mean being so scared of failure and so detached from the joy of simply writing that you just stop writing altogether, for fear that what you create won’t be good enough. So, I stuck to what I knew. I wrote essays, and didn’t touch my passion again, using my luck in writing towards an academic goal that I didn’t really want to achieve.
Until one day, I just started writing creatively again. It was somewhere in the pandemic, where we were all desperate for a reprieve from the death that sat just outside our isolation (or inside, as many of us learned), when I just began again. For those in a similar position, here’s what I learned. It really is just that easy to start again. Easy as in you can write and you will always be able to. The overwhelming guilt of “Well it’s been so long, how do I know I’m good at it? How do I know I still like it?” You are. You will. You just have to start again, and it’ll welcome you back like an old friend.
There are many ways to start again, but I’ll share what I did that’s been extremely helpful. Someone who’s in the screenwriting business recommended it to me. Every day, write a five sentence story. That’s it. A different story every day. Nothing intensive that requires you to really think about building a believable world or interesting characters with varied conflicts, just the outline that could lead to something bigger. It really teaches you how to manipulate the rise and fall of a story in so little time, but the invaluable lesson it passed on to me is I can still write. Every day, I’ve come up with something different and complete, and if you had told me at the beginning of the year that I would still be doing this in March and not have repeated myself, I would have laughed. The vast majority of the stories are throwaways, as most of our inspiration doesn’t extend past the concept of writing a story, but that’s how it’s meant to be.
Because every once in a while, you will write something that you like. And then you have the joy of creating again, after years of thinking you would never encounter it again.