Eclectic Waters

Archive for the ‘Writing Thoughts & Resources’ Category

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

– Jean Rhys

Only post what you are comfortable having your co-workers quote back to you the next day at work. David…

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This morning David came to my cubicle, leaned his elbows on the edge of my cubicle wall and said, Do you feel called to write?. It took me a moment to place what he was saying, but his laughter helped me place it. “Yeah, I know.” I said. “That’s funny! I’ve done the same thing,” he said as he walked off, still chuckling.

Great. I thought. Sometimes I forget people read my blog.

Only blog or publish things you are comfortable having others read and potentially comment on.  Some things are too sacred to write…

“We eat right, exercise daily, and still die.” – Dr. David Jeremiah (might be paraphrased)

These words lifted the fog of guilt and depression a woman was falling into as she wished and thought of how she should have taken her husband to the doctor for indigestion the night before he died, sitting on the couch.

Just a week earlier her husband had completed a physical examine and the doctor had marveled at his physical fitness.

Listening to her story I thought,

Words have power. What will you write?

When I write, I want the words to dance off the page.

What do you want to accomplish with your writing?

I never wanted to be a writer.

But my mind will not stop writing. I go to the mall, which I hate because it is ugly and fake, and I see a child interacting with his mother and my mind starts constructing a sentence.

The child with the blue shirt never understood his mother and her anger; the way she screamed at night.

The mother was not screaming at the small child. But I saw this tint of frustration and tiredness in her eyes. She might scream at night. It “What are you thinking?”, my sister asks as we walk past Express.

The pen, my mind, writes, nothing.

“Nothing.” My lips speak.

“Oh”, she says.

I never wanted to be a writer. Seeing the world in piles of words. The pen, my mind, is constantly moving, scratching forward like nails drawn sharply against a chalkboard. The pen is alive; it is water, never stopping: drawn by some secret moon. When I sleep it lays itself down, momentarily, but even then it whispers and forms dreams that are anything but normal.

I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted stability. I wanted to have a life that was predictable and calm. The kind of life that fits into the neat boxes society creates for us: Student, Teacher, Counselor, Child, Mother, Wife etc. The labels we hang on people moments after meeting them. These are the labels that kill me. I try to ignore them, and instead I leave a trail of discarded words behind me, written hurriedly on receipts and napkins and then discarded because there are too many of them. I am unfinished, just as much of my work remains.

Each week, on the Saturdays when I clean my room, I stand above my pile of rejected papers and swoop them into the trash. I stand looking at the trash, now full of my words and wrinkled paper, and sometimes the pen writes, my words are trash. And then at other times I think, how poetic, but there are too many of you for me to give each of you my full attention.

Do you feel that you chose to be a writer or that writing chose you? Could you stop writing if you wanted to?