Snowflakes On A Hot Spring: The “Writer” Within
I write, and have written. That seems a vague criteria, but I’ve fulfilled it. In Dancing Queen to Dairy Queen: A Tale of Sweet Salvation, I acknowledged that I’ve always known, even as a child, that I am only my true self through creative expression, which is complete truth. But, is my writing a creative expression, when the bulk of it consists of my thoughts and feelings hurled at a piece of paper or text box? Does that actually require any sort of talent or skill-set? Perhaps, within the ambiguous definition of the term, I am a writer. Maybe my struggle is identifying as a creative writer.
My journey began the same as most children, writing because it was mandatory in school. During holidays and season changes we were given sheets of paper shaped like pumpkins, turkeys, trees, whatever the celebration may be, with a few blank lines in the middle for you to express your feelings about the upcoming festivities. I developed a penchant for poetry at a young age, finding myself captivated by rhymes. They were fun, and fascinating. How could they always keep in time? How could there always be a word that fit the rhythm? I was too curious a child not to wonder. After bringing home one of those symbolically shaped papers, I finally enlisted the help of my parents to turn my response into poetry.
That lesson opened the floodgates of my mind. Whenever we received such assignments after that, I always turned it in with a poem in the middle. Those empty lines quickly became too few and far between for my imagination, so it wasn’t long before I started writing poetry on my own. In “Would You Rather Have An Ice Cream Or A Book?” Antonella Bernobich shares “and when melancholy would haunt me, I would turn to poetry. Poetry was more discreet, more subtle—enabling me to encrypt those feelings I wasn’t ready to display.” As I hit my teens, and became overwhelmed with new emotions, I, too, found solace in the equivocation of poetry. My thoughts and feelings were in the open, for the world to see…if they could decipher the code within my poesy.
Through natural progression, I hungered to tell stories that weren’t wrapped up in a rhythmic bow at the end. I yearned to delve deeper into the details of my content. I reached a point where whenever I started to tell a story through poetry, it began to take shape in the form of prose. I eventually convinced myself to write a story, or at least to make an attempt. After-all, poetry was creative. I was already telling stories, just in a different format. This couldn’t really be that different, right? I bit the bullet and waited for inspiration to strike.
Every spark of a new idea swiftly fizzled into smoke and an odor of what once was, but would never be again. The more books I devoured in search of pleasure and encouragement, the more questionable my own ability became. There wasn’t a thought process I could see through to the end.
Brakes squealed. Car horns honked incessantly. Unintelligible voices bounced in all directions. My pulse raced toward barren finish lines. Teeth clenched so hard they were destined to shatter. Fingers balled into fists so tight they drew blood from my palms. I opened my mouth to scream, but my inner voice had beaten me to the punch. All I wanted was a moment of peace. A halt in the chaos long enough to finish a thought. This is going somewhere, I know it. Just. Need. To. Get. To. Paper. But these bursts of inspiration were fleeting, and dissipated as quickly as they had assembled. And I finally questioned, am I really a writer?
I have written stories in my life. Most have been for school, with a specific guideline, and subject matter to be followed. I have written poetry throughout most of my life, usually for fun, or to work through what I had been feeling at the time. But, I have echoed my soul, in frantic scribbles and pounding keystrokes, for as long as I can remember. I have been telling my story in bits and pieces all along, to the pages, to myself, to the eyes in the sky.
But it was this passage from Michelle Lamarca’s essay “Books, Words, Music, Magic”, that opened my eyes to the possibility that perhaps my identity didn’t need to be found, but acknowledged:
“My writing is not a reflection of a style or type or defined by any rules. I seek to find the flawless arrangement of letters and words and sentences to express my interpretation of the world around me”… “ Sometimes I am a poet. Sometimes I am an essayist.”… “what I write is derived from an idea that I happen upon that has been unexpectedly waiting for me to coax it into the light.”
And there it was. I am a creative writer. My creativity lies in my “arrangement of letters and words and sentences”. I don’t have to build fantastical worlds, with multifaceted characters, and intricate plot-lines. I wish I were able to, but those aren’t the stories that cascade from my heart. I write of what I know, and what I feel, and what I see. The most I can do is to express them passionately, and hope that my words carry the essence of who and what I am; a writer.
