If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: An Open Letter to Letters

Several years ago I read somewhere, “We’re all looking for someone to share our thoughts. And ultimately our beds.” That resonated with me because it seems so simple but also so profound. I am one thousand and twenty-four percent better at expressing myself through my words on paper. Sometimes it is still difficult for me to express exactly how I’m feeling or what I’m doing or how I’m doing it, whatever I’m writing about in that specific moment. But if I’m writing my thoughts down, I have time to revise and edit. It’s like a filter. It’s still me communicating whatever it is that I’m communicating but it’s a different version of me. This version is much more well-spoken, more mature maybe. It is candid but in a well-thought-out sort of way.

I write because, to me, writing is like living. You just do it. It isn’t something to think about or to delve into. It’s just a part of me. Since I can remember, I’ve had a pencil in my hand and a pocket dictionary in the other. My dad used to make my brother and I learn one new word every week. We had to flip to a random page in the dictionary and write down the first word we saw and then we had various little assignments throughout the week so that we could remember whatever word it was that we flipped to and be able to use it in everyday speech. As a result, I know words like absquatulate, obnubilate, and solander, none of which I have ever (besides the week that I learned them) used in everyday speech. My brother abhorred this practice. He is all left brain—he takes pleasure in math, engineering, and other very boring subjects. I, on the other hand, enjoyed this practice. It helped me sort of immerse myself in the world of words and it made me think about language in a creative way. It’s a big reason I started pursuing writing.

If I could learn anything very valuable to my writing, it would be to understand when to stop revising. Lots of people are prone to writing a piece and setting it down forever without ever looking at it again. I am the complete opposite. I revise and revise (if time permits, of course) until the thing sounds like it has undergone major plastic surgery and is still trying to look youthful and spry but fails miserably because now the lack of flaws makes it all the more obvious that it was full of them before: wrinkles, small lips, small boobs, the whole shebang. Not to say that my writing is ever perfect, far from it. But it is to say that when I’m writing a letter or an essay, I want to learn to not try so hard to make it so polished that it becomes a different thing than what it was. Wouldn’t we all love it if the letters could just fall onto the page and that was the end of it? Well, that’s impossible. Letters are wonderful and evil things. Sometimes they work together and sometimes they don’t. But sometimes it reads more human when they don’t. I’d like to learn where to draw the line on revision so I’m not suffocating all the letters that work so hard to form the words to express my written thought with plastic wordgery. (Look it up, it’s a word.)

Beginning Again: Rocking the World One Word at a Time

So I began this blog last semester for two reasons: I always wanted to be cool enough to blog, and it was a requirement for a course I was taking. We sort of had the freedom to write what we wanted, although I use the term “freedom” loosely because we still had to keep whatever we were saying relevant to the course. Thus some of my blog posts are less than exciting (super boring) and actually I would rather have played the how-fast-can-you-jab-the-knife-between-your-fingers-on-the-table-without-chopping-off-a-digit game and lost than slapping dull interview transcriptions onto the space that some call “artistic online domains.” I have found that, for me, writing to write is the dumps. It does nothing to advance my right-brained ramblings. But I think I might prefer the writing to write method over the writing some words down because someone says you are a certain level of “good”—whatever that qualifies—when you do method.

My primary resolution is to just write. I want to write because I love it. I want to write because I have something to say. It doesn’t matter how many times I do it and it doesn’t matter if someone thinks I suck at it and it doesn’t matter if what I have to say doesn’t matter. I want to write for myself and not think about how my writing will impact other people all the time. I do that enough for school. But I also don’t want to write just because I have a quota or an alternate agenda to fulfill; as far as “free-writing” goes, I only want to write when I have something to say. Something real.

One time, I wrote a personal essay about a bike and my childhood and what that bike represented. The piece featured words and phrases like “maturity,” “growth,” “upward success,” “trials and tribulations,” and “bumps in the road.” You don’t even have to read that essay to know it was a piece of shit. Seriously? Bumps in the road? I felt like I was writing something that might be so boring and cliché and ridiculous that my reader would weep terribly and say something like, “I’ve never been actually bored to tears. Alas.”

My secondary resolution then is to begin again. The humdrum, lifeless, learning-to-ride-my-bike-taught-me-how-to-overcome-obstacles anecdote is the scum of the earth. (Not always but, for all intents and purposes, I will treat it as such in this particular right-brained rambling.) I want to revitalize my writing. We’re all told to write outside of the box but the truth is there are lots of stellar, creative ways to write inside the box. I lost my passion for a while, because I clichéd the pen right out of my hand as the words came flying out of my ass onto the page. Everyone is just too busy thinking about how to connect life and bicycles (lifecycles?) when the really real thing is the thing that’s real and all you have to do is write about it.

Writing and revitalizing. Revitalizing my writing. Writing my revitalization. Whichever, whatever, in 2016, I am rewriting my vitality to write.