WHY IS WRITING SO HARD?
Hey pals, let me give you a run down of what’s going on. I tried a new writing exercise where instead of sitting down at my computer to physically type with censorship and perfection pressurizing my thoughts, I removed my hands from the keyboard and instead spoke the words onto the screen with the help of Google Doc’s Voice Typing.
In lou of “make it exist first, make it good later” I did just that. By the end of this entry you will learn right alongside me as I organically pour out my thoughts, then go back into this doc to digest them, andd viola ! Here is the final product !
As I try to reinstitute a sense of polish and poise in my life, with wonder and whimsy of course, I want my writing to embody that same energy. Someone who channels this energy I am aiming towards with an authentic and honest perspective is Anna Howard. Her content prioritizes substance and value, treating words as gold-gleaming treasures waiting to be excavated from the depths of our souls. She reminds us that the true beauty lies in the excavation itself: the digging, sifting, and polishing that reveals our innermost selves. How deeply vulnerable and exhilarating.
In one of Anna’s videos, she talks about writer’s block and her relationship with writing.
This conversation got my gears turning all the way back to my writing origins. The California Public School System.
In school, it felt like my writing had to be perfect, curated, and A+ on the first go. Most writing in school was prompted: directing what to write about, what side to choose, and how to deliver the message to an intended audience. 9 times out of 10 that ‘audience’ was a teacher, quantifying writing performance via a double-edged sword called Bias. You, as the writer, are acknowledging your own bias while simultaneously censoring or exaggerating to cater to said teacher who controls your G.P.A. Talk about a conflict of interest.
This tireless cycle of opinion masking and conformity despite desire is why unstructured writing in school was borderline incomprehensible. Formal literary training is the stuffy antagonist guffawing at creative writing. No wonder any effort put towards a thought-provoking writing exercise either felt frivolous or forced. We've been wired to follow specific instructions and avoid deviation with fear of a bad grade since we were in kindergarten. I have written countless papers on novels, historical events, you name it, I could do it in my sleep. That’s how they trained us.
But feeling like you can just put a bunch of words on a page and call that writing, that requires an entirely different confidence.
The American school system did a fabulous job of making us think there is only one way or “right way” to do something. There is a rubric, a format, with a particular font size, page header, citation style, and you shouldn't use contractions or weak adjectives, and on and on. Underneath all these rules is where the creativity lies. It feels silly to just be finding this out now and ask myself the oh so common question, “why didn’t they teach us this in school?” I would have loved a journaling elective option or Stream of Consciousness 101 course in college.
But would I have actually taken them? Probably not, because at the time they didn’t factor into getting my grades as high as possible. But now, post grad, with no quantitative digits to define me, creativity is all I have. And what a gift that is!
** I would like to derail my train of thought for a brief moment to add that while I am breaking down how formal writing has wired us to deprogram creativity-not all school and all structure is bad.
If you know me, I am quite the organized, rule-following, type A individual, and these traits would make sense considering I grew into them alongside learning to write, solve math equations, and memorize Spanish vocab words in a scarily similar way.
I guess I have all of my teachers and professors partially to thank for unknowingly encouraging my perfectionist, robotic approach to not just school, but life as a whole…? That’s a can of worms I won’t be cracking open at the moment but this is what happens when you just let the uncensored thoughts flow LOL!**
As I sit on my couch voice typing all of these words into a Google Doc, I am actively forcing myself to sit in the creativity. Thank you Anna Howard for reminding me that there is more to words than rubrics and rules. Within this creative pocket lies a myriad of alphabetical combinations begging to be explored, free of a judgemental professor’s red pen marks or one’s own critical gaze.
So let’s explore, excavate, poke, prod, and polish up all of this untapped creativity.
Hold on…
Where the F*** do I even start?!
This is the hard part.
All I have to do is start somewhere right? Let everything unravel organically, like in this exercise:)
It’s not always easy to allow for my raw initial thoughts and opinions to speak for themselves. When the words are flowing from my mind onto the screen I don’t even realize I am veiling my authenticity. It’s subconscious. It makes sense that we have to unlearn this, because it was drilled into our impressionable growing brains for years.
Analysis aside, I just need to start, and you can too!
If there is so much beauty in writing and finding your voice, why does it seem so difficult to uncover? It’s like we have penciled in our own fine print that states: a perfect intro, hook or attention grabbing title is required to “start” writing. Yea no. Forget the fake rules, and the real ones. Rigidity is a word you should associate with good posture and engaging your core in yoga sculpt - NOT WITH WRITING.
All of the refinements are not even relevant yet, which circles us back to “make it exist first, then make it good later.” It’s so true. We put so much pressure on ourselves to make something exist perfectly the first time when in reality, there is a whole separate phase for workshopping and drafting that we forget about. And guess what? Your opinions, thoughts, and feelings might change as you're rereading and evolving your ideas, and that's okay! That's the whole point.”Perfect” writing- where's the authenticity in that? And I get it, there are times when creativity strikes and you just have this undeniable flow of thoughts jumping from the folds of your brain to the lines of a page seamlessly and it's magical. But that's not always the case.
So I'm challenging myself right now (and you) to speak freely, and write free-er. Be aware of your subconscious efforts to censor yourself. There is no grade pending. No permanent red pen grievances to lay awake at night thinking about. Just your authenticity! That’s enough. How on earth are we supposed to cultivate creativity if we are self-enforcing rigidity and fearing what it looks like to begin? All we can do is try to articulate as best as we can in the moment. And unlike the suspense of the start, the finish doesn’t loom over you. It’s not concrete! Just like us, our writing will continue to grow, evolve, improve and take on each part of us. And with a reignited sense of creativity, the possibilities are endless!
Because again, you can always come back, regroup, and refine.
But how are you to do any of those things if there is nothing on the page?
Creativity does not look the same in everyone, that’s the whole point.
So create, write, excavate, sift through, sift again, create some more, write, rewrite…..bus, club, another club, another bus….you get it!!
That’s all for now folks! Stay tuned for more entries like this- the original Google Doc I voice typed into is 8 pages long, single spaced, so there is a lottt of content and creativity to be explored. Cheers to an endless fountain of creativity and an oh so poised, fashionable and fantabulous week.
XOXO, HAGO.
