Tag: passion

When Did You Fall in Love with Writing?

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No. Not when you started writing, but when you fell in love with it. I’ll go first.

Freshman year, High School, Survey Literature. Mr. Clark didn’t know it, but his vocabulary list had me open. He thought I’d look up definitions. He was wrong. I devoured them. I tried using every new word in a sentence and like most people in love for the first time, I sounded like an idiot.

I became obsessed with their meanings, their pronunciations, how they looked on the page and, most importantly, how they made me feel.  Seduced by the euphoria of getting words off my chest, letting the emotions ooze from my heart and out of my flesh; stitching my soul into the page one heartbeat at a time, and riding the wave of stillness while traveling through books. I fantasized about how words would pair; how they would rhyme, mix and match. The smells of metaphor, and the taste of simile calling out to me from the words of healing written in a language I didn’t quite understand and yet, knew it was a necessary part of my sanity. For if I could not depend on writing to be my stepping stone to mental clarity, then I was truly lost. Forgotten in a world without meaning. No explanation for the question mark of our existence. No saving grace. No salvation to play just the right scripture to guide us back to the music sheet. Writing. It was my music sheet and goodness, how I loved him.

What about you? Are you in love with writing? When did you fall for it?

Not in love yet? Here’s a post about how to get there! 6 Ways to Fall in Love with Writing

Ink Pen

Writing-freelancer

Dear Ink Pen,

No, just listen.

I want your lips

nestled

against the collar bone

Of this page

I don’t care that people do not hand-write anymore

I need you

nibbling at history

and touching passions

I desire your soul

pressed hard against my fingers

I need you

touching minds

and resurrecting souls

In private places

Let your hands roam their computer screens

Kissing the interior of their hearts

Freeing the thoughts of men

Leave us naked with hope

Vulnerable

And open with the desire

For your nose against the nape of our necks

Let us drink of the truth dripping from your mouth

The taste of light lingering on your breath

But first I need you

Your lips

Nestled

Ball pointed

Against the collar bone

Of this page.

Yes, that’s it.

Now

touch them.

Are You Just Seeing Your Writing on The Side?

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“Is your writing going to be a lover in the center of your life? The thing you pulse toward, the fever in your soul? Or is your writing life more of a casual crush, something you think about, but don’t do much about? You know how when you are in love, lying with your lover, time stops–goes so fast and doesn’t move at all? You feel mushy and goopy, and you are wet and hot and cool and loved and lovely, all at the same time?

Here’s the thing, there is one way to make time stop. And only one way: Fall in Love.

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When you have a lover or a baby, you fall out of time, and into the beloved. Love is the only time in our lives when we are out of time. To create a writing life, you will need to fall in love–deeply, seductively, passionately–with your writing life. It will become not a habit or a job, but a lover. If you keep it a second-string lover, your back-up lover, your Tuesday night sex-as-friends kind of lover, it might always be cranky with you. But if you make your writing life so lovely you can’t take your eyes off it, you will space out during meetings, and dream about it as you go through the day, just like when you’re in love. – Heather Sellers, Page After Page, Chapter 3

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Heather Sellers is an Award winning writer and professor who has taught writing workshops for twenty years, has a Ph.D. in writing and is an associate professor of English. Her book, Page after Page, is a great resource for writers looking to jump-start, begin, or keep the writing juices flowing. She presents great advice on how to dedicate yourself to writing, enjoying the process, and writing exercises to help keep you passionately, seductively, and totally in loooovveee with writing.

You Don’t Have to Do What Everyone Else is Doing

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that your words flutter nervously across the page in anxious anticipation of acceptance. I can see the dilating pupil of uncertainty starring back at me, for you have let others define you. It’s not enough that you wear societies clothing, listen to its music, read its books and regurgitate its ignorance, but you even let it define who you are. When you do gather the courage to be yourself it is not long before you are already planning on how to take your words back, erase them into the dungeon of nothingness. Some of you climb inside of yourself and turn off the lights, over there praying for invisibility and trying not to be you. Why do you cloak yourself in darkness? Always skating timidly through life as if the next step will be the one to shatter the ground. Always apologetic for the way in which you see the world as if your purpose in life is one big mistake. If you have passion, stand by it. You owe no one an explanation. It doesn’t matter what we struggle with on a daily, it always helps when we are ourselves. Despite the mistakes we make being transparent is the only way to transcend and to overcome. In that process, remind yourself that you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. Besides, “if you don’t define yourself for yourself you’ll be crushed into other people’s fantasies of you and eaten alive.” – Andre Lorde