Rambling Writing on Writing Ramblings

I have a desire to write on a regular basis. It’s a burning need that I must spill my scattered thinking onto metaphorical pages with eager fingers, tap, tap tapping slower than my thoughts need them to.

I’ve often considered signing up for creative writing classes or attending new fashioned Zoom seminars but then I can’t help but wander about what I’d even really get from them – someone bumbling on about writing styles and chapter structure may have it’s benefit, but my want to spill emotions can’t come from this kind of a lesson or lecture. It’s personal. Very personal – and so it should be.

I’ve been considering why I feel this way. Have I always felt this way and if not, when, and if so, why?

This piece is nothing more than my own self obsessing and analytical mind exploring the depths of my own psyche and experience but yet, I feel eagerness to pen it. Perhaps there’s some order and calmness of mind that can be gained from structuring racing thoughts and questions into something that looks more logical – within paragraphs and sentence structures when it’s really nothing but emotional exploration and intrigue, or perhaps there’s even some form of narcissism in the whole exercise.

I began writing when I was really young and I didn’t write stories of my own to begin with. This came much later. Actually, I found I had an obsession with writing down the lyrics to my favourite music. This is at least the first solidified memory I have of finding a love for words and art and how they mesh together into something exquisitely painful, or beautiful, sorrowful, or inspiringly hopeful. I’m confident I couldn’t have articulated this at the age of six or seven, but I knew this on an instinctive level, without a doubt. I remember sat with my special notebook, tape cassette inserted and recording the radio and as soon as there would be a song I liked, I’d then be able to rewind, pause and start scribbling incessantly. The age of CD buying changed this habit and ruined all this fun, with lyric inserts all ready made. Not that this stopped me from scouring the lines and letters and finding meaning in them, like an astrologer playing a game of ‘dot to dot’ in the darkest of nights.

A common rhetoric in our house – and one of the few complimentary ones, was “Laura has been helping me to write letters and telling me how to spell since she was six” and it really wasn’t untrue. The question though, that I self impose, is how was I able to do that? Writing lyrics and being able to pick out grammar errors, find the appropriate language for my Father’s business letters seem to me, to be as far apart as hot and cold. Having said that, polar opposites as I understand are inherently the exact same thing, so perhaps different writing forms can fit into this paradox of sorts. If you understand language, do you then possess the ability to use it in all its forms? Whether that be for art, or business – or more so, for logical Vs emotional satisfaction – what is the drive for the latter that the former doesn’t necessarily develop?

I distinctly recollect a need to write creatively – and in secret. I would write short stories not suited to my age bracket, ranging from horror to things far more graphic and absurd than 50 Shades of Grey contained (but we all know how dreadful the writing was in this series, don't we...). I wrote everything I knew I shouldn’t and I did it with a knowing – and a love – for it’s protection of utter silence, combined with deafening boldness. Within a household climate of being ushered into not making a fuss, I found a freedom that nobody could pull away because I’d just write and throw it away into a school bin the following day. I wasn't this careful with sandwiches I left to go mouldy when I'd hide them in drawers - It became my secret refuge and it empowered me at a time I had absolutely no power in the world at all. I kept a personal diary in my teenage years and this wasn’t safe from prying eyes and slaps to the thighs. If they’d have ever found my best kept secrets, I wonder what the reaction would’ve been to these, when my being “blue on Monday” because I was unrequitedly “in love” was enough for grounding and being chased down a hallway.

With this said, I think it’d be fair to conclude that one of the driving forces for me, personally, was and still very much is, a feeling of empowerment in being able to express myself or explore the world in a hidden corner, observing, studying, analysing and fantasising through the simple use of words, arranging and rearranging to become my voice. Though the protection of being behind the pen is a strong force, I understand I have a desperate need to feel heard, so the developed relationship between secrecy and self expression is an “it’s complicated” dynamic. Also, I'm coming to a place of understanding the need to be heard is really a symptom of the basic but powerful human need to feel loved.

Perhaps the very nature of being able to read back my darkest thoughts, to see words formed and acting as a protective cocoon around every type of emotion I experience gives a sense of order, of self awareness and simply allow me a voice in a world that feels unadulteratedly suffocating and stifling.

Writing should, I think, come from desire. A desire to give others other worlds to roam within, a desire to understand, to be free, to be somewhere or someone else, a desire to mutilate oneself within the boundary of the metaphorical, a desire to set things straight, for justice, for crying, for joy, for healing, for love, for hate, for all that’s confused and all that’s lost, for all that’s learned and for every win.

To write, is to simply be free.