07/31/13

By the time I was twelve, my family had moved eight times.  I was fed-up.  I had just left yet another elementary school, where I had finally gained substantial popularity by doing super cool flips off of the swings.  And I was this close to actually “going out” with Stu, whom I had been pursuing all year long. 

Now I had to start all over again.  I was sick of it.  So I wrote a poem and it helped.

Writing: my main coping mechanism since 2003.

Until last year, I had pretty much written nothing but generally depressing and extremely vague monologues.  Like this.  There were also the overwhelming amount of poetry written concerning my pathetic, hormonally-marinated, chronically broken heart.  Like this.

After a while, I decided that I wanted to try writing different things.  You know, the kind of things that people might actually read and enjoy.  So I wrote this post, and made a goal.  I sincerely wanted to better my writing, expand my abilities.  Tell my stories.  Connect with others.

After that came a horrendous string of some pretty awful experiments. 

I recently went through my archives, often finding myself thinking, “Who wrote this?  It’s terrible!”  Followed by deleting and editing in order to save some dignity, because this is on the internet, this stuff. 

But the main thing I’ve gathered is that I’m a better writer today than I was a year ago, and that was the whole point.  If you write someone a pillow, they will sleep on it.  I’ve started learning to cut the fluff, I think, which has always been a challenge for me.

Throwing any thought that pops into your mind at paper is a great way to stay creative, but the truth of the matter is that not all of those thoughts are going to be worth keeping around.  Sometimes you just need to scrap the crap.