Writing? or Just Scribbling?

28 Aug 2014 Leave a comment

by Quietude's Junction in journal, reflections Tags: , , ,

Everything that I read says that if your goal is to be a writer, then you must write every day whether it is a tiny bit of excellence or excessive excrement. I understand how this works, but I have a small problem with it, too. Well, not just one, a couple.

By trade, I’m a speech pathologist in the school systems. To say that I write every day can be a vast understatement. There are days when all I do is write: plans, lessons, behavior analysis, creative set-ups with explanation, research plans, et cetera just for my job. On those days, when I come home, the last thing I want to do is look at my computer much less put my fingers back on a keyboard. My brain is complete, utter mush when I finally find my way to a seat that is not at my desk. I’ve even been known to pass out within moments of sitting down.

When I have these days of excessive writing at work, they tend to come in spurts where for several days and sometimes weeks, I can barely keep my eyes open once I leave school. But the flipside is that once this behavior ends, I tend to gorge myself in writing for creative outlet. Writing during that time is not so much a chore as a compulsion. I find that even when I’m “resting” while the story churns in my brain, I’m truly still writing it. Ideas flow, problems solve themselves, and issues that I had before the writing flurry suddenly make incredible sense. I find my creativity spikes hard in all directions for all of my hobbies.

I’ve been told that unless you have truly written that you never know what it’s like to stick with something. Well, I have stuck something, twice. I spent a year working on and writing my dissertation. It was a work of love and hate, joy and excessive pain. In the end, when it was finally ready for its birth, I collapsed in exhaustion never more ready for something to go away than that piece. So, yes, I’ve done a long work. I chose to write a qualitative piece, instead of the more accepted quantitative, that was over 300 pages when done. So, even in academia, I was playing to my strengths of expression.

So, no, I don’t do creative writing every day. Maybe I’ll never be a true “writer” but I have achieved my goal of writing stories, poems, and papers. It may not be a “writer” in the manner that is prescribed by so many successful “writers” and “authors”, but it is my way. Perhaps it only works for me. Perhaps because my goal is writing and not necessarily publishing, that’s what makes it work.

I write for enjoyment, for purging, for release, for companionship, and for escape. I write to learn about myself, to let my brain wander to the places it needs to go to heal. Writing is a part of me that I’ve lived with since I was in elementary school when I wrote my first counted poem in third grade about wolves running free. By the time I was in fifth grade, I had improved to the point of winning the district level essay competition. So, yes, the ability to write has wrapped itself around me sometimes like a blanket and other times in the form of a python strangling me until I gave into the ideas that it wanted me to bring about. Granted sometimes the blanket brings out scribbling while the python brings out the writer.

Memories of another time, a different me

27 Jul 2014 Leave a comment

by Quietude's Junction in journal Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Tonight is a time of reflection. I find myself remembering an old boyfriend from college, Rob Greenway. He was that bohemian personality who was a musician with a genius IQ. I used to say that he belonged to the philosophy of the month club. He liked to try on different Eastern philosophies for size then, when you asked him why he did or didn’t do something anymore, he would reply that it went against …. (fill in the blank) philosophy. During the short time I was with him, I think he went through three different philosophical venues in about 3 months. His brain just couldn’t stop searching for a version of the truth that he could accept. He was a very gifted musician and song writer. He kept several spiral bound notebooks of songs he wrote with their annotated key/chord structures and his guitar tuning for each one. He loved to listen to various acoustic guitar players, then would sit sometimes for minutes, other times for hours figuring out just how they tuned their guitar to create the pieces that they did. Until I met him, I was naive about guitars and thought that they only had one way to be tuned, silly me.

Rob was a kind person, a romantic with a very quirky sense of humor and his own sense of honor. During that time I was going through an extremely shy stage of life and was fairly quiet.  I was that girl that would long for something but never quite get up the courage to go get it. While I was with Rob, he taught me that I was placing boundaries upon myself that I didn’t need. My grandmother said that I never quite learned how to smile as a child, but the neighbor said I smiled with my eyes only. Rob taught me to smile with my entire face, to let the joy out. We would sit under the oak trees on the old North Campus of UGA where he would play his guitar and sing to me the songs that he wrote while squirrels pelted him with acorns. He swore that they aimed just for him. I went along with it just to tease him.  He encouraged me to do the things that I only dreamed of but didn’t do because I had been trained to never step out of the box in public. He told me that acting outside of the box was every bit as fun as thinking outside of it was. He would laugh at and with me on those late nights when I would “set the balloons free” on North Campus after they had orientations and such. It was a simple joy, but so much happiness was derived from watching the balloons float up to the stars.

I haven’t seen or heard from him in 16 years or so. I ran into him at the Ren Faire one year as he was racing to his performance. We hugged and caught up as much as five minutes will allow you. He had traded in his sweet tenor voice and guitar for the penny whistle. He said that too many nights performing in smoky taverns had destroyed those perfect, clear notes of his. He went off chasing his dream, his performance, his love and craft. I wonder where he is now and then and if he finally found that dream of his.