A Loss for Words

I don’t think there has been a very specific moment in my life where I’ve lost my love for writing. I believe I’ve had a number of little moments where I felt like giving up on writing for many reasons; whether I was stuck in a piece or couldn’t get a piece started at all, or I was just disappointed in what I wrote, that it didn’t feel like I’d taken the writing to its full potential. I could never imagine myself totally giving up on writing. I can’t help but write every day, not just because of classes and assignments, but also because my need to put down the things I see. I observe my surroundings and in them, I find characters, plot and conflict, abstract ideas. These things I put down, mentally at the time, then later on paper. Truthfully, I don’t immediately put these ideas to the test in a piece. I write fragments and leave them as is.

Although jotting down ideas is a part of being a writer, it is nowhere near the full scope of writing. At the beginning of each school year is when I, in a way, reboot myself as a writer. During the summer, I never find time to write pieces and hardly find time to read. It’s not necessarily that I lose my love for writing, it’s just that I lose some of my abilities. I become unfamiliar when I’m away from it for too long. I attribute my ability to rekindle my love for writing to my teachers and peers. Again, I regain it at the beginning of school. Assignments in creative writing can be very stressful because they require a lot, mentally and emotionally. Being in the class environment with people who have the same love for writing as I do and knowing that they understand is encouraging. It’s a reminder that I’m not alone and that it’s not just a grade, it’s practice within my craft. I’m forced to clean off the rust of not having written anything for two and a half months.

Another way I rekindle my love for writing is reading other people’s work. It’s another way of understanding that I’m not the only one on a journey to knowing myself, things instilled in me and around me, things I know too well and don’t know at all.

–Lindsay Yarn, Digital Media Editor

The Rapture of Writing

It was towards the end of last school year when I lost my love for writing. All my pieces seemed lack-luster and dull, due to a combination of the persistent tiredness that usually rooted itself around all of the tests in May, and a lack of inspiration from a year of nonstop writing. I found myself hopelessly jotting down story after story and doing everything I could to finish out the year strong; I would make character maps and force myself to journal every day and endlessly research ways to regain what I had lost, however nothing seemed to work and once school ended, all of my efforts seemed useless and I gave up once and for all, taking the time off to stop stressing about what I was putting down on the page and focus more on relaxing.

The idea, in theory, seemed helpful, however the longer break I took, the more of a rift arose that, as time passed, produced a growing divide between my craft and I that wasn’t noticed until I tried to write again a few weeks later. I remember sitting in front of my computer screen for hours at a time, but eventually leaving the same word document blank, and far more uninviting than it had been when I first started. It felt hopeless and once again I gave up, deciding that I needed this break. That all that writing throughout the year had drained me and I needed more time. I had never once thought that perhaps my struggle came from my constant, invading thoughts and not the lack of creativity itself.

It was about a month after that, however when I was getting ready for a flight to Seattle with my stepmom, that my passion for writing began to spark up again.

I had heard so much about Seattle and how it was a city you can’t help fall in love with, a city crowded with graffiti and creativity and artwork. The image of watching the city move below me, as I sat on the balcony filling page after page with writing seemed more than inviting, so I decided to pack up all of my pens and hard-bound notebooks and my laptop to once and for all conquer my “writers block” and find the creative part of myself again.

It wasn’t until we were sitting at the airport, however, that I reached down into my carry-on bag to find my notebook and realized I had left that very book sitting on my bed at home after rearranging everything in my bag. Trying to problem solve in my head, and explaining the ordeal to my stepmom beside me, she introduced the idea of simply buying a notebook in one of the many airport stop-n-go shops we had passed along the way. The idea sounded senseless considering I had a very detailed organization system, but deciding to take a chance I made my way to the nearest stop, picked out a small red book and came back to my seat to just write. And I wrote. I wrote poems, and snippets of stories, and streams of consciousness, and character maps and everything I could think of. I wrote and wrote and wrote without stopping, not letting myself get in the way and not caring if the book tore or if coffee spilled on the pages or if the words smeared.

I realized that it was not that I had a lack of creativity or any form of “writers block,” but rather that I was overthinking everything I wrote and holding myself back. It was as if I had created a dam in my mind to stop all of the ideas and now it had just broken open again, making its way through my hand and onto paper. I realized then that writing has nothing to do with the tight constraints of how you write but more to do with finding that creative space your mind won’t let you into and diving in deep.

Since then I have found myself pursuing writing more and getting less frustrated when something doesn’t work out, and instead just moving on to something new and fresh. I journal every day and I read more often and I get random spurts of inspiration that lead to stocked up pieces on my computer and in my notebook, I look back on often. I’ve cleared my mind of harmful thoughts about what to write and how to go about writing and where to start, deciding to simply just let my mind wander and take me somewhere new every time.

I finally found the key to writing that I was looking for all along: imprecision.

–Lexey Wilson, Junior Editor-in-Chief

Discovery

Becoming Junior Editor-in-Chief this year on Élan has taught me about writing in ways I didn’t expect, because being editor isn’t just about organizing people or putting together the editions. It’s about cultivating a collection of work that defines the publication. My role forced me to look at writing not just for its individual value, or my person connection, but from a critical eye: seeing the merits in work I don’t immediately connect to, defining why a piece matters outside of my personal experience. When we were reading for the spring book, I had to step in for the first time and make executive decisions about every piece we published: Did it represent Élan? Did it show thoughtful and professional technique? In the end, learning to identify the techniques of a piece of writing has given me a new approach to my own art.

Before Élan, I would often produce work, and struggle through understand what exactly happened on the page before me. I knew when a piece was strong, when it fell flat, but I could rarely define why these things happened. Selecting work for our books taught me why: I began to identify specific and thoughtful word choice, structure, characters, imagery, and poetic ambiguity, placed in the right moments, which made the words of a piece come interact with the reader. I was writing poetry myself as these ideas became clearer, and for every step of revision, I found my path more clearly defined than ever before: I picked out where the diction lost its power, where the images came out dull, the metaphors obvious, and moved forward with careful steps to create a new draft. Élan taught me how to read like an editor, and it taught me to become more decisive in my own work.

This year was all about learning for me. How to select pieces, how to release a book, how to pick out spelling errors or comma malfunctions in extensive paragraph. How to build up Élan Literary Magazine, constantly improving what we do and how we do it. I move into next year with an immense amount of knowledge, apprehension, and excitement for things to come. I will be challenged as Senior Editor, to make decisions and set plans other members of the staff depend on for releasing each edition. Perhaps most important, I will be educating the new Junior Editor in how to take on these responsibilities, passing on the Douglas Anderson tradition of this literary magazine to the next year, the next audience.

Bringing together writers and artists from around the nation, and the world, into a single collection, has been an incredible process this year. Few things have been quite so difficult and demanding, but few have been as rewarding. I have gained such respect for the work of student artists: their bravery, talent, energy, and passion for expression. Above all, next year, I am looking forward to reaching out to as many people as this publication can, gathering the stories of young writers, young artists, to share and inspire.
–Ana Shaw, Junior-Editor-in-Chief