Creative writing is one of my majors at university, and a big part of what we're meant to do in our own time in order to improve is purge writing. Just sitting down and letting your stream of consciousness come out on paper, whether it ends up being about guys or family problems or Teen Wolf or how insulting 1D doesn't make you avant-garde it just makes you a dick. However I am me, and if someone tells me to do something I will almost always do everything in my power to avoid it, so my consciousness remained unstreamed. Until today.
Lately I've been feeling a bit trapped in my own head to the point where I'll feel angry or upset and not be able to figure out why, and I thought that short of a witchdoctor or an exorcism, purge writing might be the best way to get ma insidez out. Deciding to make a proper indie go of it, I went to this park near my house and just wrote everything that came out of my brain, and oh man was it confronting to read back. It's so weird to me how something I didn't plan in any way managed to come out so perfectly formed, saying everything that I've wanted to say but couldn't consciously put together.
My recent struggle with trying to express maself can most concisely be illustrated thus:* There's this one line in a 5 Seconds of Summer song that as soon as I heard it stabbed me in the soul and made me want to write, but the more I thought about it the more I realised that I couldn't put it any way other than how they already had without it losing some of the meaning. That feeling of knowing the sentiment you want to convey but not being able to find the right combination of words to get it out is something that I find endlessly frustrating, possibly moreso than anything else, and because writing is something that's always come easily to me, when I genuinely get stuck there's usually a bigger reason behind it.
I've been writing a lot more than usual lately, but aside from a few specific cases it's felt kind of strangled. It's like I have such a clear idea of what I want to say before I start but as soon as I go to actually write it I second guess every word and phrase I use and sit there for so long thinking about whether there's a better word to use that the urgency and the actual feeling that I was trying to project die down, and all that's left is frustration and half a really shitty sentence waiting for an adjective that probably doesn't even exist. I feel like the emotional weight behind what I'd been thinking and feeling (obviously I'm going through an intense little period at the mo, so this is to be expected) exaggerated the sense of importance and pressure I felt when I was writing ---
Just did exactly what I'm talking about with this blog post. I stopped in the middle of a sentence and went back and read over everything and by the time I got back I completely forgot what I was trying to say. Basically, I couldn't put my thoughts into words until I stopped trying to.
I can brainstorm and edit and reedit and use the frickin thesaurus tool all I want, but reading back over what just fell out of my brain when I stopped trying to make everything perfect, I think it's my favourite thing I've ever written. There's no point where I stop in the middle and think that I should have said something else, because that thought had already gone down onto the page when I was writing it; it IS my thought process. I don't look at it and think I missed the point or I trailed off or I should have said something another way. There are literally bits in between really hekkerz level deep sentences that just say "the ants are biting me", and the last word is 'sandwiches' but it's perfect. It's revealing to the point where I legit texted Sara saying that reading it back felt like I was walking around looking at parts of my own brain that I was intentionally ignoring until now, and I had no idea where it was going at any point but it tapers down and ends better than I ever would have planned.
The point of this isn't "shizdang I'm fantastic come hear about this amazing thing I wrote that I'm never going to show you," it's that sometimes in order to get something done you have to get out of your own way.
A lot of the time I'm really happy with things that I write consciously, but I'm quite a guarded person, especially at the moment, and unfortunately in my experience the best writing I do comes from raw emotion. The songs that I'm happiest with are always the ones that came out of either ten minutes of word vomit or half an hour and a whole lot of crying, not the ones that take like an hour to start and then ten more minutes later on and then 20 minutes after that of redrafting and planning and figuring out what the point is. The concept that's coming together in my mind as I type this is that the things that I consider to be my best work and that I'm happiest with in the long run are the ones that come organically when I get out of my own way and just accept how I feel about things. And that's a really hard thing to do. Writing with a purpose is such a conscious thing, you think about what you want to say, how you want to phrase it, what other people are going to think when it's done and they read it. And being emotionally guarded, whether you're aware of it or not, gets in the way of that entirely because you end up censoring yourself to the point where what you're writing loses its authenticity.
So yes, to summarise, I have been converted. There is now one kind of ungraded uni work that I will happily do. Because apparently switching off my brain and letting my thoughts vomit themselves out borderline-illegibly onto some paper while a crow gives me shifty eyes and ants bite my feet** turns me into a fucking genius.
Maddi out.
~*mic drop*~
*I have literally no fuckin clue whether that made grammatical sense but tbh I'm basically stream of consciousnessing the shit out of this blogpost too so step off
**I am not indie now I swear to god so hard