My Relationship With Writing
My relationship with writing is like a real life relationship. It is not predictable, monotonous and requires a whole lot of effort to work out. One moment you can’t stop yourself and be passionate and the next minute you’re thinking why on Earth am I doing in this? There are times you just want to give up and move on, and it is up to you if you have the heart to give up a great love.
This parallelisms is maybe one of the reasons I found it apt to choose the work of Kristi Eisenberg titled “Learning to Write” and “There are no Secrets” by Arnel Arevalo. We, in a way share a paralleled relationship with the art of writing.
First of all, writing was never easy, owing to the fact that it requires passion and inspiration, an awful lot of deep thinking, experiences, knowledge, imagination and creativity to name a few for it to be meaningful. Honestly, it took me a few nights before I even started drafting this composition, owing to what I call a dry spell of inspiration and passion to write, which I have been experiencing for the past months.
The opening line of Ms Eisenberg “I have loved to write and hated to write, mostly the latter” made me realized how writing is not just mere putting of thoughts and experiences into words but it is by itself an experience, and collectively we can call a journey.
I may not have a focused experience and related background towards writing compared with the works of the people I have read, owing maybe mostly to the fact that I am a business major back in college.
However, we do have similarities in a way like Ms Eisenberg and Mr. Arevalo; my experiences in writing have been mostly in school. I have always wanted to be a writer, since the first time I joined and got rejected by our student publication in high school, but despite such relapse I managed to hone myself through exposure to other peoples writing. It was very difficult primarily because I easily get discouraged. The desire to be a writer made me hold on.
I tried and applied again, this time in our college publication, where surprisingly they offered me to be not just to be an ordinary writing staff but as their news editor. It was a moment of elation. It was a validation of the hard work I have put myself into improving my writing skills, which included keeping afloat after the countless rejections and doubting whether I was ready for this craft at all. I never stopped up to this day and consequently, in my senior year I occupied the Editor in Chief position and had the chance to share what I know to younger writers as well.
Another common denominator probably with our experiences is that the habit of reading contributed to us as writers in a sense. Reading for me has been my primary inspiration to write. I became first an avid fan of personal blogs before I even came to write a meaningful and heartfelt composition. I felt empathy towards the personal problems, the joys and moments of inspiration from the posts I read from my favorite blogger as if I was one with them. Somehow, reading their experiences helped me develop insights about the realities of life and later on used these to process meaningfully my very own realities. There came a point I wanted to be one of them, out of the desire to give back and help others see things in another perspective, so I started to write my own experiences online.
Blogging was also the medium for me to release thoughts when verbal communication fails to deliver my needed comfort. I believe sometimes we like to let the world know what or how we feel and our confusions and aspirations and never want any response whatsoever, writing is one way of doing that whether it be in an online blog, an old school diary or journal and for those romantics a message in a bottle.
In so many ways, I owe my continued physical existence and the relative immortality of my thoughts to writing, for as long as my posts stay online, my thoughts will forever exist.
I owe to writing my very survival, especially now that I seek higher learning in my Graduate studies.
I would like to thank the two authors, Ms Eisenberg and Mr. Arevalo who in a way I have “cross referenced” myself through our compositions. This activity might seem to be counter to the notion of “not comparing our own works with others”, but looking at it personally, it has made me see myself with fresh eyes and develop an understanding that writers often have similarities and even wavelength towards writing as an experience, as a journey.
Writing was never easy, at least in my opinion, especially now that this epoch we live in have created many distractions that lead us away from one of the very reasons our present is what it is today.
Writing would never be a breeze, at least for us writers who struggle and still works in progress, but that makes it more interesting and fun to do right?
This work was submitted as a requirement through an online workshop on Literary Criticism.
Photo Credits: Writer Head
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