My thoughts and reflections are written in blank books. I am a journalist. I have been doing this off and on for years. There are times when I have been very faithful in my writing and times when I have gone for weeks, months and sometime years without writing. Some of what I write will be as short as a sentence or two. Other times I will write for pages. Sometimes I will simply make a note about a quote I discovered or a passage from a book I am reading. It may be a list, a piece of music I want to remember or some other random note to myself. Recently I have started adding doodles and little bits of art to accompany the writing - creative journaling.
This blog, this forum, is another avenue for me to write. About mid-week I begin thinking about what I want to write about. I will turn it over in my mind and perhaps jot down a few notes. Then early Saturday morning, I’ll pour a cup of coffee and come upstairs to my office and begin cobbling together my thoughts for that week. I am not certain what you call this type of writing. I look at it purely as an online extension of my journal. Though it is personal, it is not as personal as one would think a journal or diary to normally be.
I have written other things. In my life I have written the music and lyric for a few songs. There are a few poems that I can look to and take a small amount of pride. I have composed dramatic sketches for reading or performance and once wrote the accompanying script for a church Christmas musical.
Still there is something that I wish I could do that I have trouble doing. It is a type of writing that escapes me.
Fiction. Fiction in a long form, a short form, any form. I can not seem to manage it. This frustrates me.
I feel that there are three things that hold me back, three for sure, maybe more. One is that I do not not know how to begin. What is the story? Who are the characters? Where is the setting? What is the conflict? Why did it occur? How is it resolved? Did the characters grow through the experience? Did they change? I feel that I have a few questions to ask but I can’t determine who or what to ask them about.
This leads to the second thing; the idea. I seem to draw a blank on ideas. That’s it. Plain and simple.
Third, it is easier to write about life. As hard as it can occasionally be to frame what I write here, it is much easier than trying to come up with a suitable piece of fiction. And for that reason it is easier to simply not make that much effort.
It would be easy if I could just leave it at that. Simply recognize that creative writing is perhaps something I am not able to do, or not meant to do, and just move on. After all, there are already so many things in my life to occupy my time: journaling, drawing, photography. These are all things that I enjoy and I wish to become better at doing. Why take on the headache of trying to accomplish something else?
It is one word, creativity. God is creative and He created us to be creative. He gave us our five senses so that we can fully experience the creation He has placed us in. He gave us our intellect and our abilities to communicate. Some choose to communicate through the spoken word while others communicate with their pen. Their product may be prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction, but it is their creative outlet. There are those who share their experiences through painting and sculpture. Others compose and perform music. Some make film. Some see the world through the lens of a camera. The expressions of creativity are endless; as many expressions as there are people to create them.
This is why. This is why I write in blank books and doodle. This is why I continue to try and take better photographs. And this is why I wish to write a piece of fiction. It is another avenue of expression that I wish to walk down.
Greg
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