Writing: Floodgates of the Soul

Input and Output

Writing is a cornerstone of literary living.

I love reading a story, memorizing a poem, or watching a good movie.  These expand and fill me, my heart, my mind, my soul, and provide valuable raw material for growing, maturing, and simply enjoying life.  They are input for me, part of the fuel that keeps me going.

Writing is the opposite: it’s output.  Expressing thoughts, ideas, feelings and impressions on paper helps me own and incorporate the input.  Writing provides an outlet for things that really need to get out: joy, anger, ideas, dreams and so much more.  Living literarily involves both in and out, a balance between the two.

Steam Released

Setting words to paper is like releasing steam from a kettle: it relieves pressure.  Writing can even open the floodgates of the soul, providing an outlet for deeply felt things.  I want and need to express myself and writing is a primary way that happens.  I find I can write worries away, or at least whittle them down to size with words I set to paper.  I can understand a concept or recognize a feeling by writing about it.

Over the last 12 years I have lived abroad in some fascinating places and from two I wrote about the life, culture, and people.  I sent those accounts in emails to family and friends who forwarded them to their friends.  Many wrote to express their appreciation.  Ever since I stopped writing these essays, a loyal handful of dear ones have regularly asked when I would start writing again.

Well?  Now!

One Doable Bit at a Doable Time

I’m sold on the idea of doing a little bit of something rather than not doing the thing at all.  Over the next months, I’m going to write ideas for writing that are more attainable than, say, write a novel or your memoirs or seven pages of a journal per day.  Somehow, since writing the last batch of essays from abroad (2004-2006), I have imagined the writing task too big.  I’ve thought I needed just the right setting.  I’ve thought that with my day job, I really didn’t have time to be a full-time writer (sadly, I don’t).  Or that I needed to write something completely original, or at least something as good as John Updike or John Irving or other great writers.  Or that the world and the literary market and the Internet are so full of words, words, words, what original thing could I possibly write?

What I’ve discovered is that I can write one sentence a day.  Or a paragraph.  Or even a page.  I can incorporate writing in small, doable, and for me, fun ways.  I can also be and trust myself, my eye, my ear, my voice.  This is another crucial recognition.  And, if it’s words put together by me then it’s original enough to write.

Along with all the ways to live literarily, I will be writing about writing in this blog.

Writing Venues

I’m going to write about lots of ways you can write.  Can’t wait to tell you how a commitment to write a Daily Sentence put me back on the path to regular writing.  Also, though it’s not original, the practice of writing morning pages had a lot to do with me finally picking up the pen again.  I combine doing that with keeping a Family Journal where I mix thoughts and poems and ideas with shopping lists and phone numbers and whatever comes up that needs to be set down.  I’ll be including the letters and essays I sent from Bombay and Jerusalem, plus a new set from where I live now on the banks of the Potomac River.  Looking forward to writing about keeping a Calendar Journal, possibly one of the simplest ways to start writing.   At some point I’ll write about Burns’ Commonplace Book and the other journals and notebooks artists and writers and composers have used.

Ready to let off a little steam, to start your literary output process?  Write!