Each time I face an empty page, it’s an opportunity to exercise a creative muscle. The process of taking an idea, impulse, or feeling and finding the words for it, and forming it into phrases and sentences is fascinating. Sometimes the words come quickly, often they don’t, but it always feels rewarding when the words feel right, when you read on the page words for feelings that you previously could not articulate. It makes all that inside feels more valid and more real.
Most of the communication in our life happens through speaking. Being able to be understood in the world requires that you can find words quickly and accurately convey your idea, feelings, and experiences. Spending time writing in solitude is a way to practice and develop my skills as a speaker.
When you write, you have the time to focus on a feeling and write and edit in a way that you can’t when you speak. The process of writing and retrieving the right words to express your thoughts is the same “muscle” you use when you are speaking extemporaneously in conversation. Leaning into the moment when you can’t find the right words when you are writing makes that feeling in conversation feel more normal. Through working through the challenges of a blank page, you learn how to see the pause in a conversation as more of an opportunity than a failure.
Writing down a thought forces you to work it out, to see it for what it is. Flaws in logic that were unseen in your mind become clear as sentence fragments on a page search for completion, and as you struggle to make incomplete thoughts cohesive. This process stimulates further development of ideas as clarity and connections become apparent on the page.
One of the things I love the most about writing is that it connects me to writers of the past, the present, and the future. I’m engaging in an activity that defines what it means to be human, and is central to the human experience. While writing has led to pain and trauma, writing is also an activity that has changed the world for the better, make our society more equitable and save lives.
To write, to sit with your own thoughts, to find the words, and craft phrase, sentences, and paragraphs is a wonderful thing. The writing process can change the way that you see the world and see yourself.
There have been a couple moments when writing where the process is so emotional and cathartic it has brought me tears. When the words flow without any kind of barrier and your heart opens on the page, the feeling you are expressing in that moment is everything. As the intensity passes what you are left with on the page is so much more words.
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