Writing Into Life
And finding my way through
Here is the biggest obstacle to people who say they want to be writers—they don't write. Which leads me to the one thing I fear most about being a writer: I don’t want to end up sitting at the bar drinking with the writers who never write.
Yes, believe it or not, if you want to write, then you have to write.
But this admonishment doesn’t really capture what writing is all about. Writing, for me, is a way of life. By which I mean, it is a way of living and of coming to terms with the world. We write through and into our experience, and the writing changes the experience.
How many of you have ever had a difficult feeling, emotion, or situation occur and your head spins on it? You know, you go round and round about that lady you loved and who is rejecting you. Or you dwell on that awful situation with your boss at work. Or you committed a social faux paw and it just won’t leave you alone. Your thinking goes in circles in a kind of unending self-induced torment. If only I had done this. I should have said that. Why do they behave that way? On and on it goes.
Writing is a way out of this.
Or maybe your spin is on a creative idea. A poetic line comes into your mind. A story idea. You go around with it. You imagine the characters or get an inspiration on a next line. Then, you try to hold that in your mind while the world rolls on by. It becomes too much and the memory just can’t handle it. Then, you wonder in your doubt why you can’t express yourself creatively.
Writing is a way out of this.
Perhaps you get really angry with a child or your spouse. You simply can’t believe what they did to damage something important to you. You stew on it. The anger builds. You hold it in because you know, instinctively, it is dangerous. But still, it builds, and finally, when she says something to light the fuse, you explode, doing damage you quickly come to regret.
Once again, writing is a way out of this.
Why is writing so helpful? Because writing is movement. It is intellectual, emotional, and imaginative movement on the page, from line to line, moving the thoughts along, and in so doing, it opens new doors, new ideas, and literally, new experiences. You think of things you never thought of before. Curiosities appear, new perspectives open. You actually move through thoughts and emotions instead of staying lodged in them. This is one reason why poetry and journaling, in particular, are often described as “wild.” You never know where it is going to go until you start.
For me, writing is less of a commitment, discipline, or even devotion than it is a desire. When you come to expect this movement, and therefore the relief of the pressure that comes with it, you look forward to it. Sure, there is a “put your ass in a chair” attitude to writing, and if you are Stephen King and need to produce work commercially, that’s exactly what you need to do. But most of us are not doing that. For most of us, writing can become a desire because it makes our lives better. It becomes a joy—something you can hardly wait to do every day.
This is how I got to 196 volumes of my journals. My only way to understand myself and process stuff was in my journals. Some days had breakthroughs, and some did not. But the writing always moved me out of the spin and into a movement of some sort. And I needed movement. My life in recent years has been filled with gut-wrenching loss, overwhelming grief, ecstatic love, and turmoil beyond anything I could imagine. It was easy to get stuck, and hard to get out. Writing saved me. It was my way through. It is my way through. It will always be my way through. Indeed, for me, it is not overstating it to say that writing is life.
Anthony Signorelli
To see one of my article that came from this approach, you can go here:
