Ramblings: why learning to write is painful

The way that we learned to walk was an exhausting and painful process. The way that we learn to tell stories is even more exhausting and much more painful.

Why? I guess it has something to do with our expectations.

It’s like we expect ourselves to be experts at all of this on day one.

We have these great stories in our heads and we expect ourselves to be able to just write them out. We expect ourselves to be able to write one awesome draft and be done with it. Maybe we’re not naïve enough to expect writing to be easy, but we definitely expect ourselves to be better at it. Don’t we?

But we’re not.

Ramblings: Writing Poetry

Eyes closed, mind open, thoughts focused, pen wondering—it’s exploring beauty, and I’m writing poetry.

I breathe in. My lungs fill themselves with cool morning air. By the smell of it I can tell that there was rain last night; by the feel of it I know the fog has yet to burn away. I breathe out.

Writing poetry is like that. It’s like breathing. If I think about it too hard it doesn’t seem quite right: it’s irregular, unnatural, forced; and, somehow, even though I’m going through all the right motions, it still feels like I’m suffocating.

So I don’t think about it; and I don’t force it. I let the words flow as they will. I feel the rhythm of language rises and falls as an intricate pattern of words and the sounds they make comes to life.