Tag: Inspiration

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

Beneath the Tree

I’ve lived in the same house since I was six years old. As I was growing up and beginning to write, I was discovering the world at the same time, often through the same outlet. I’d find myself walking around my backyard, which is an acre of woodsy land, looking for inspiration. One day I came across a tree I hadn’t seen before; it was huge, with the perfect dip in the grass at the base of the trunk for me to lay a blanket down and stretch across with a notebook. That spot quickly became a safe haven for me, where I would escape to journal about my day or write to distract my mind.

I started out by writing cheesy love songs. I’d lean against the tree, staring up at the branches touching the sky, and write sappy songs about it. Eventually the songs turned into poems, and I needed more to write about than just leaves and the sky, so I started writing about my own life. However, even though I may have found new places to bring inspiration and experience into my writing from, a piece of that spot has always been present in my writing. I continued going out there, encouraging myself to write outside. Not only did the tree spark ideas within me, it was also a quiet place for me to find peace of mind, and relish in it. My home has always been pretty hectic, so that escape was something I really needed to get somewhere personal and intimate in my writing.

Even today, I think nature is extremely prevalent in my writing, whether I purposely implement it or not. I wrote a poem about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and how deep their relationship truly went. Woven throughout the poem was a metaphor of the daughter being a plant that her mother, a gardening hand, was tending to; she was trying to prune her into perfection. Often, I read through a piece I’m working on and notice some form of symbolism or metaphor that I hadn’t even purposely used, but it makes the poem or story all the more powerful. That’s what amazes me about nature; it’s always there, it’s often ignored or taken for granted, but it always finds a way to weave itself into the deeper meaning of everything, to have purpose in writing, and in our lives.

Throughout my years in Creative Writing programs, I’ve often been asked if I have a favorite place to write, or thing to write about. Each time the question is posed, my tree is the first thing that comes to mind. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing about it or not, I’m still writing because of it. After ten years, it still manages to inspire me. Now, when I have a rough day, I still find myself walking to the end of my property with a blanket and a notebook, ready to sit down and wait for the inspiration to hit me. It almost always does.

–Makinley Dozier, Website/Submissions Editor

Nature as an Emotion

Logan's picI was outside a lot as a kid; my dad took me to the woods, my grandma took me to the swamp, and I took up the habit of reading outside, beneath the adolescent peach trees we planted before moving from South Carolina. Not only did being outdoors afford me a wicked tan, but my contact with nature throughout my childhood has given me a foundation of ideas to spout from in my writing.

Emotionally, nature has a lot to offer in writing. As a general example, weather can impact a scene’s tone as strongly as making a character explicitly weep. The sun brings happiness. The heat brings stagnancy. The storm brings violence. The rain brings rejuvenation. But, to step even deeper, it helps me to draw from personal experience with nature in order to create a stronger emotional output within my writing.

Nature, for me, tends to be a communicative setting that my characters or poetic speakers interact with in a way that brings up certain childhood memories. I have written many times about one place called Kingsley Lake; if you live in North Florida, you may have heard of it, but otherwise, it’s a body unknown to most. This lake is where I have spent a week from each of my summers since I was nine. It’s a place where I feel safe, detached from the world, and uninterrupted. In other words, it’s pretty zen there, aside from the sunburns.

But what can I write about this place when it feels entirely positive? There is always some meat to an experience if you ponder it long enough. In my poem “Kingsley Lake Escape” (which you can read in Élan: Fall 2016 Online Edition at https://elanlitmag.org/issues/archives/), I had to dig for the reality of being at Kingsley Lake, and in doing so, I discovered how scared I am of leaving that place every year to return to reality. To communicate this idea, the natural aspects of the setting can be manipulated and interpreted in order to portray the appropriate emotions to match the intention. The main aspect of the lake that I focused on in the poem was the water, in its bathwater-like serenity that I wanted to communicate the calm of chilling in the lake. But there are a lot of other aspects of nature at the lake that I didn’t mention in the poem: the tree whose leaves spill over the lake house during bad storms, the sand that stains your feet beige by the end of the second day, and the heat lightning that silently lights up the sky when night rolls around and the air cools accordingly. In settings, nature can be used to make the reader feel almost any emotion; you just have to be willing to make the sensation personal, and in doing so, allow yourself to write from your own experiences with storms, forests, and other natural occurrences that hold emotional potential to draw from.

–Logan Monds, Co-Social Media Editor