For the last half hour I have been reading recent blogs written by my mom, my friends, an old teacher, etc. I find myself wondering when exactly it was that I stopped being a writer. When did I lose the inspiration? How did I turn from someone who used to come up with stories or blog ideas by the hundreds to someone who has to force herself to log in and write something more or less once a month?
All I can say is that I don't really know. Maybe life got busy. Maybe I simply changed.
But how could I have just changed? I have been a writer for as long as I can remember. I used to get into trouble because I would write things that I shouldn't have when I was angry. This first time I ever really remember being in trouble was because of something I had written after I had gotten in trouble. How is it that I have just changed into someone who doesn't write?
My first thought is that it all started with yearbook in 9th grade. That was the first time that I started writing things that were not fiction. I had to write about the boys on the basketball team and how we should never forget the year we had. Somewhere in that time frame I noticed that I had stopped writing fiction. The stacks of random notebooks filled with barely-started stories began to get smaller and smaller... Until they faded away. When I noticed this, however, I started writing again. This was just shortly after I had broken up with my fist boyfriend and my life was getting crazier and I was stressed. It was when Mrs. B told that my work as copy editor was done for the year and that I should finish up the year in her Creative Writing class.
I was appreciative of it because, as much as I loved yearbook, I was tired of skipping lunches and staying after school. I was also tired of trying to get the rest of the staff to actually do what needed to get done in a timely manner the right way.
Since I had taken the class the previous year there was no reason for me to do the same poems and the same multi-genre paper again. So Mrs. B gave me, along with two others, the choice to spend the class time writing a novel.
The inspiration was back.
I decided to write a collection of short stories about the twisted and interconnected lives of a boy and a girl starting from when they met as little kids to her death. It was something that I had started in the class the previous year. It was good. I had a plot. I had characters. I had a time line. And by the end of the year I had Chapter 2.
I stopped writing again. The inspiration just was not there. I knew what was supposed to happen in Chapter 3 of my book but I couldn't seem to decide on the format that it should happen in. So I walked away from it. I knew that by doing so a couple of things could happen. I could leave it alone for a while and then come back to it with new found determination or I could leave it and forget about it and come back to it a long time later and find that I still had no idea how to write Chapter 3.
It just so happened that the second scenario was the one that played out. I set it aside and I came back to it... Well, I haven't really gone back to it yet. But as I sit here thinking about Gryffin and Andy and wondering where the next chapter of there story should lead them I am drawing a blank.
That was not the last time I had inspiration though.
There is this program called NaNoWriMo that my older sister introduced me to years ago. It stands for Nation Novel Writing Month. It's a website where tons of people come together every year in November and start writing novels. Across the country people get involved. Some have writing parties and get togethers. Well, last year I tried to do that. I had a semi-new idea for a story that had been in my head for a long time and I started writing it.
The idea came from a role play/story that Morgan and I started writing together in 8th grade. We got pretty far into it before we came to a point where we just couldn't continue. Part of the reason was because we could not seriously write the romance our story had come to and part of it was because we were beginning to drift apart.
Anyway, the story was about these two guys who find this portal to another world. One is from New York and one is from a town in the other world called Uleanda (I know it's dumb, we just threw a bunch of letters together). They are professional assassins who live in New York but travel to Uleanda sometimes. The major conflict is that there are men in Uleanda who want to bring the weapons from New York and combine them with the ones they have in Uleanda to take over the universe. We even had a super evil bad guy and background stories for every character. We had sequels planned out and we knew just what was going happen. But life happened. We stopped writing and we stopped being best friends.
So when November and NaNoWriMo came along last year I figured I would try to use the same plot line for a novel of my own. I changed the characters and I changed the plot around a little. I even wrote and introduction which I showed to some of my friends. They were all very intrigued. The problem was that my inspiration was not coming in order. I would write a scene in the beginning of the book and then I would write one from the middle. It was still coming along... It just wasn't very organized.
Then... Well, let's just say that I had some problems come up. I stopped writing because I was no longer in the mood to write. I didn't think about what would happen to the story. I didn't think about what it meant for my writing. A switch just flipped in my brain and I guess I just stopped writing.
I didn't stop completely. I was on the school newspaper staff and was therefore graded on the writing I did for the monthly issues. It wasn't fiction though. I have always been able to write nonfiction easily. I love writing essays. I'm very good at writing essays. And I'm good at writing for the newspaper too... Not that I really do much of that anymore either... At least not frequently.
But that was the last time I wrote anything fictional. It's been almost a year and I haven't actually written anything for myself or for an audience outside of school since. I wrote on this blog... But I doubt anything I've written in the last year has been any good. In fact, I think a lot of it was just me talking about how I didn't have time to write or how I didn't know what to write about.
So as I was reading these blogs I realized that I miss really writing. I miss losing myself in worlds that no one else knows but me because I created them. I know that I never have finished anything fictional that I've written. I know that I'm not very good at it and that my plots are too closely related to books I have read and movies I have seen. But I miss writing that stuff all the same. I don't really even know why the blogs made me think about that. Maybe it's because I feel that my best writing is when I'm describing a character's thoughts or actions, however unoriginal they may be. Maybe I don't just miss writing fiction. Because I am definitely enjoying writing this blog. It has an actual topic that is not what I have been doing lately or why I haven't been writing. It is a decent length. It is probably better than a lot of the stuff that I have written in the past year.
I've always wanted to become an author. I don't have to be too famous. I just want to write a good piece of fiction that some people will read and like. I want to create a world that more than just my closest friends and I see. I want to feel like I've actually finished something. Carley wrote something on my blog once after I had posted that first short story that was once complete but is now part of an incomplete collection. She said that I should continue it. That I should finish writing the story of Andy and Gryffin because I didn't know how great a feeling it was to finish a story. She said this because she does know that feeling. She has completed a story before even though the only people that read it, to my knowledge, were her and the person she wrote it with.
Maybe the reason I don't write anymore is because I know longer write just because I have the inspiration, because I have a story, but because I want to finish something. I write because I want the accomplishment... And not the story. Or maybe it is because I search too hard for the inspiration. I have sat down more than a few times in the past year and tried to write something... Unsuccessfully.
I am making a goal for myself to start writing again. Maybe I'll try to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I can find a new plot and new characters... Or maybe I could try to finish Andy and Gryffin's story or the one that Morgan and I tried to write in 8th grade. Either way, by the end of this year I wouldn't mind to see the mostly empty notebooks with half started story ideas start stacking up again. In fact, I want the notebooks to start stacking up again. That's my goal. I want to go back to being the writer I am. I want my inspiration and my creativity back.
