April 6, 2008 at 8:39 pm (Thoughts on Writing)
Tags: autobiography, fiction, memoir, philosophy, writer, writing
I was well into my second semester as a Creative Writing major when one of my professors made a comment that greatly altered my perspective. It came at the end of a story he told about his college days.
“That,” he said, “was when I first began to think of myself as a writer.”
As simple a statement as that was, it struck me in a profound way. Did I think of myself as a writer? I had been writing stories and poetry for years, and yet, whenever I described myself, I was a student, an employee, a friend – not a writer. Writing was something I did, not something I was.
That thought stayed with me, and gradually I began to come to view myself as a writer. To think as a writer, to live as a writer, to be a writer.
So what is the difference between a writer and someone who simply writes?
In essence, nothing. Anyone who writes is, in the broadest definition, a writer. However, once writing becomes so much a part of a person’s life that it becomes an inherent part of their identity, then the description ceases being “I am someone who writes” and becomes “I am a writer.”
For me, this happened when I began to see the world in terms of how it could be translated into words. I began to think of conversations and situations in life as potential material for stories, and I began to delve into my own thoughts, experiences, and feelings in terms of how those could be expressed in poetry.
Writing is no longer something I do, it is a part of who I am – I am a writer.
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January 30, 2008 at 10:21 pm (Thoughts on Writing)
Tags: Writer's Block, writers, writing, writing tips
Sometimes when I sit down to write, my thoughts are like demons within me, romping about, bickering with one another, tussling in my brain. Every now and then one of them will call out to me, and I will struggle to capture it immediately, to imprison it in words on the page before it can slip once more from my grasp and resume its frantic scampering. I struggle with my thoughts one by one as they struggle with one another, and they are ever-moving, jumping, shifting, chaotic and unrelenting. Only when I have captured the very last one and fastened it firmly to the page do I finally feel a calm, elated peace – peace that comes, in part, from a sense that I have just accomplished something grand. I have wrestled my demons to the page, and now I can finally have a moment of silence.
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January 30, 2008 at 12:43 am (Thoughts on Writing)
Tags: words, writers, writing, writing tips
Writers have a unique and important challenge.
They must take the materials they have available – ideas, experience, language – and assemble them into something altogether different. More than that, they must not merely assemble them, but craft them, so that the pieces fit together into a finished building that invites others not only to admire it from a distance, but to enter it and become enclosed by it. The trouble is determining which bricks are worth making a building out of, and which should be thrown into the rubbish pile.
As writers, we must be able to set aside the fear and innumerable distractions which get in our way – the stumbling blocks, to put it tritely – and locate those blocks which are best suited for building a firm and appealing foundation. We must be able to craft experience into buildings, ideas into towers, and through the streets of language connect them all into a spectacular city which invites the reader to both enter and explore.
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