Loved this! Such a great read and so many good point made! I think we define ourselves as writers by what drives us to write. For me I use it to make sense of life, like going to a yoga class or calling a friend when I’m drunk in the bath at 2am and lonely. I write to reflect the times, but also because I am sometimes scared of them. So it’s all of it really. And usually when I don’t even plan to write, my best stuff comes. Yesterday I wrote a whole poem while at the hairdressers and I didn’t have my journal so it was a notes app job, and she kept trying to get me to lay my head back down and honestly? In that moment, I’ve never felt more like a writer 💗
Loved reading this and was so surprised and delighted to see that you have a piece in Worms—I just bought a copy of the Love issue last week!! can't wait to read your work
I've been thinking about effort a lot too—some of my writing projects come out of a spontaneous instinct and feel very natural and expressive (though it does help to polish up my sentences)…and other projects are very belabored, very constructed, and not always successfully so? There's something to be said for writing that—and this sounds so cliché—has an irreducible authenticity and ease. And easy writing can touch people in much the same way that serious, high-exertion writing can…
There is soooo much rich, rigorous thinking here that I don't even know where to start in terms of gushing and instead I'm just going to share this thought that popped into my head:
"I suppose there is no such thing as writing for oneself. Language itself wouldn’t exist otherwise." How does this line of thinking change / expand when you add the fact that writing was invented as a means of tracking debt? [insert some kind of deflating swirly-eyed emoji face here]
Loved this! Such a great read and so many good point made! I think we define ourselves as writers by what drives us to write. For me I use it to make sense of life, like going to a yoga class or calling a friend when I’m drunk in the bath at 2am and lonely. I write to reflect the times, but also because I am sometimes scared of them. So it’s all of it really. And usually when I don’t even plan to write, my best stuff comes. Yesterday I wrote a whole poem while at the hairdressers and I didn’t have my journal so it was a notes app job, and she kept trying to get me to lay my head back down and honestly? In that moment, I’ve never felt more like a writer 💗
Loved reading this and was so surprised and delighted to see that you have a piece in Worms—I just bought a copy of the Love issue last week!! can't wait to read your work
I've been thinking about effort a lot too—some of my writing projects come out of a spontaneous instinct and feel very natural and expressive (though it does help to polish up my sentences)…and other projects are very belabored, very constructed, and not always successfully so? There's something to be said for writing that—and this sounds so cliché—has an irreducible authenticity and ease. And easy writing can touch people in much the same way that serious, high-exertion writing can…
There is soooo much rich, rigorous thinking here that I don't even know where to start in terms of gushing and instead I'm just going to share this thought that popped into my head:
"I suppose there is no such thing as writing for oneself. Language itself wouldn’t exist otherwise." How does this line of thinking change / expand when you add the fact that writing was invented as a means of tracking debt? [insert some kind of deflating swirly-eyed emoji face here]