As far back as I can remember, stories have captivated me. I wanted – and still want – to read all of them and write many more. When the fancy strikes me, I daydream of what it might be like to make a living as a writer of some kind. Putting pen or pencil to paper still brings a thrill. Sometimes I watch my pencil craft letters onto a previously blank page in wonder at the transformation. A blank page holds so much possibility. Why then, does writing get the short shrift in activities I choose to do?
Often over the years, this disconnect between the thrill of authorship and my actual choices of what to do with my time baffles me. I think of a line from Hamilton (the best musical ever.) “Why do you write like you’re running out of time? Why do you write like you need it to survive?” At the same time that I fully understand Hamilton’s urgent need to write because I feel it myself, I also stop and wonder why I find it so hard to stop doing other things so I can sit down and write.
I started pondering this topic, once again, after watching “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,” but a fantastic movie as well as an amazing book. The protagonist, Juliet, finds herself at a crossroads after the war. Having lost her parents yet found an American fiancé and success as an author, she feels stifled. Her authorial success comes through the voice of another, a character she creates, Izzy Biggerstaff, whose voice she writes through, not her own. The events of the story help Juliet find her voice, among other things, and inspires her writing. As always when I watch or read a story of that ilk, I feel inspired and convicted at the same time.
I have no answers as to why I frequently choose almost anything over writing. I can easily succumb to the time suck of internet research on a not so urgent topic or choose to put on a podcast and do anything else besides writing. Granted, during the school year, the primary consumer of my time is school and school-related obligations. As long as I work in my chosen profession, a long time hopefully, that time consumption will not change much. The “free” time, the time left over after completing vocational duties, that’s where my personal struggle lies. For some reason, my mind has placed a mental block around writing, characterizing it as a chore, as something I need to hurry up and cross off my to-do list so that the real relaxation can begin.
I think part of the hesitation to begin writing comes from the fact that once I get started, I immerse myself so thoroughly that I emerge to face the passage of a significant amount of time. A loud, overpowering part of my brain focuses on the time lost, irretrievable for fairly mindless activities that that same portion of my brain demands as compensation for the effort expended while teaching or planning for each school day. That part of my brain overpowers the part that revels in filling up the blank page with words, with crafting stories and recording memories that bring immense pleasure multiple times from writing text to reading that text months or years later.
What makes me succumb to this loudmouth bothersome portion of my brain? (Yes, that is another Hamilton reference.) I do not have a concrete answer. I know that as a fallible human being, I will always crave ease. I will always tend towards laziness. Although crafting stories may come easier to me than to others, authorship still requires dedicated effort. If I always choose the easy path, I will never achieve the things I truly want. I have faced this dilemma before and have even written about it previously in reference to running, another one of my passions, and the effort required to reach the goals I still have not yet achieved.
The journey forward will not be free of potholes and bumps in the road but by writing this entry, I make yet another first step towards my goal. For the first time in a while, I focused solely on writing these words and did not attempt to multitask through the process, a wonderful benefit of several school obligation free hours, the result of a snow day. In the future, I hope to think back on the words I have written here and bear them in mind the next time that nagging voice tells me that I will enjoy doing nothing rather than putting pencil to paper.