You Should Write More

Harness your gravitational pull with your written word

"Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences."
-Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

There are two different camps of writers. There is the workhorse and the genius. Sometimes these two styles can overlap, but often times they are at odds. The workhorse is someone like James Clear, who says, if you want to be a writer, you have to write. In his book, and multiple interviews, he explains how he sets apart times in his schedule and dedicates that to writing, almosts like a shift he clocks into. Now, the genius, a la the iconic Ted talk from Elizabeth Gilbert, is under the impression that we are vessels for the writing and we can sit and wait for the words to find us.

For the majority of my life, I would fall into the latter. I have always loved writing, talking and thinking. These things are all the same to me. I am a feeler, a thinker, a processor and a communicator. I wrote in diaries, notes, stories whatever I could to explain myself. One of my favorite hobbies is texting. Seriously.

English classes I could read a book and love the class discussion on the topic, but once a paper was assigned with a word count and MLA format… ugh… it takes all the joy out of it. Writing prompts and morning pages and poetry workshops, no no no. Not for me. I need the inspiration. The heart ache. The exciting whim of a new idea to thrust me into my Notes app. The emotions fill the well, and I write the well dry.

I am not a work horse writer. I have not written in over 2 weeks, which is unusual for me to not have access to the well. What have I been doing instead?

Well, I’ve been thinking, some, and playing, more. I’ve been anxiously tapping my fingers and indulging in snacks and drinks when available. I’ve been waking up early and staying up late, grinding my teeth on both ends of the day. But most importantly, I have not written, and I feel horrible.

When I write, I feel a freedom to be who I am and to say what I want to say, without the fear of taking up too much time, or someone else taking it personally. It clears the cobwebs from my brain, and acts as a liaison between the thinking and the playing parts of me. The writing is the processing I was missing. I was waiting for a big emotion, to send me to the well, but I have been a little numb, and there was nothing there.

These unprocessed emotions stick to your teeth like cavities and hang around your waist until you can’t button your pants anymore.

I have been waiting on the invitation — to write. Like as if a fairy godmother would come down and find my laptop charger, make me a cup of tea and sit me down to write. Maybe she would even hurt my feelings, and a poem would come. That would be great, wouldn't it?

I realized yesterday, when I am not writing, I am not feeling and I am not processing. You might have seen me say “directing the mind —> writing your story”, on IN-ORBIT Instagram page, which is not just a vague phrase I’ve coined, but something I believe in, because I trust we are in control of our own narrative and in charge of how our life plays out.

Maybe, there are genius moments, but they will come few and far between, and we all should be writing, workhorse style.

My healthy emotional life cycle is:

thinking - processing - writing - feeling - playing - resting -

and so on and so forth.

So, here I am, writing, getting back in the saddle.

I think you should be too. You should be writing.

If you don’t believe my words, here are some favorite quotes about writing from the most famous of us.

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
-Anaïs Nin

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
-Saul Bellow

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
-Robert Frost

"A word after a word after a word is power."
-Margaret Atwood

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
-Albert Camus

"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called 'leaves') imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time--proof that humans can work magic."
-Carl Sagan

and my life’s mission

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
--Charles Baudelaire

As always, thanks for reading.

Love, Britta