From Stabbing Pages to Spontaneous Stories: My Journey to Intuitive Writing
Writing has not always been a simple task. In my early years of taking up a pen or pencil, staring at a piece of paper, and desire to write, more often than not, it ended with my stabbing the page, scribbling back and forth until the paper tore. I could see hundreds of stories, landscapes, painful uprisings, and protagonist's sufferings, but I could not put them on paper. I even wrote a short story with a ridiculous name, which I have since refined. More than anything, I experienced anger and resentment. This was magnified when I saw my closest friends write book reports, essays, and other school assignments as if they could read, comprehend, and summarize anything they were told to.
Reading has not always been simple. The first book I finished reading was Rumble Fish in eighth grade, and the second book was All Quiet on the Western Front when I was twenty-two. Since then, I have read twenty-three books and listened to over thirty. I was the quintessential child who would read a sentence and forget what I had read. Always believing I had some attention issue, I belittled myself and degraded my capabilities or lack thereof.
Poems, on the other hand. I could write poems without thinking; I could write a poem with an ease that I had nowhere else. I used to say, and sometimes still do, "Give me a pen or pencil and a paper, and I'll write you a poem that means something to you, and I don't have to know you; just look at you." It was an enjoyable arrogance and now it is more akin to a parlor trick. Taking basic observations regarding body language, facial expression, and the level of disbelief into consideration, then writing. It turns out that if I stop focusing on what I am going to say or write and focus on my goal, the writing and speaking part takes care of itself. This I found out, was not limited to poems.
I was given a broken four-string bass by a UPS truck driver when I was 19 and suffering from an, at the time, unknown autoimmune disease that I later discovered is Celiac. I did not play much until the April before my twentieth birthday. When practicing, the same anger would come out as I had when attempting to write stories. I felt I needed some kind of blueprint or template. Some sort of prompt before playing a song or writing a song. Until I began thinking of it in the same way as my poems, while practicing alone in my parent's garage, often without plugging in my bass to an amp, I would imagine having someone in front of me. I would say, "I'll write you a bassline that means something to you without thinking." I later joined two other musicians, and we created the band Ghost Color.
Writing has become a simple task. I took a few semesters in college, and I would write my research papers within an hour or so without having to think about much. If I had read it, I would recognize that I wanted to use it in an upcoming assignment. The writing part was fun, especially when I was writing arguments. Before that, when I was twenty-three, I began writing Around the World, Heaven to Hell, and finished writing it in less than six months. The day I finished, I was in the recording studio with my band; I do not recall what song we were recording. Immediately afterward, I began writing the second book, which has since become the third.
All this is to say that I believe creativity is relative. There is no right or wrong way to go about creating what we desire to create. I know my writing is not some Pulitzer prize-winning piece, and I doubt it ever will be, whether due to content or quality. But I know my writing is unique. I never learned creative writing through any medium besides my mind and experiences. It has not always been good, and honestly, it is not as good as it will be next year, in five years, or when I write the last book of my life.
All of my writing has a goal in mind. The story is written, but the steps are not. When writing my books, it often feels like I'm watching a movie play out in my head; when I look back, I'm shocked at what I wrote. While writing them, some of the more graphic scenes do not cause any emotion, but when looking back, I feel terrified at what came out. When I have a happy ending in mind, and I'm writing the ending, it often switches because the characters are not ready for a happy ending. They are usually broken, angry, in pain, and suffering from the previous traumatizing events. I've never met or seen anyone simply say, "Wow, that was painful, but I'm happy now." We tend to say some instead of messed up things and hurt each other after we've been hurt. So, my characters write their own stories.
What I desire is for everyone to find their muse. Whether you write, sculpt, paint, play music, work at a desk, do sales, stock shelves, etc., everything can be done creatively. I worked in a warehouse for fourteen years and constantly found myself daydreaming about stories and packing parts to keep them safe in ways that others did not. And my question is: Can you be creative when creativity is discouraged, and uniformity is all but enforced?
