In case nobody is aware of the fact, I happen to be a writer. I know, big surprise coming from someone who writes a blog that is composed of words, which I have typed because we live in a digital age and that amounts to the same thing as me saying I've written them. Clarification of the meaning of writing aside, I do write but I prefer the creative side rather than the autobiographical or stream of consciousness styles. Not to say that I don't literally place parts of my personality, my mannerisms and whatnot into my characters but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Yeah so I write things and stuff and that's all I'm saying about that for the moment.
Now we get onto why I consider my writing so important to me. I've always had an adoration for books. I consider one of the best things that my mother ever did for me was get me to join the library when I was 7. Up to that point, my world was fairly limited. I had school to go to of course. I was occasionally, very occasionally allowed to have a friend over. My group of friends was extremely small because I didn't like people as I couldn't mix well with them. I was still allowed outside the house then but I didn't have anyone who lived near me so most of the time I was at home on my own. I used to just have my own thoughts to entertain myself with and that was certainly interesting for me but to have a whole new world opened up by the library!
All I wanted at first was information to all the questions I had in my head: how the planet came about, the universe, evolution. I ran through books pretty fast and it wasn't long before I started looking at fiction stuff as well as factual. I found that once I started on fiction, I read more of that than anything else. The way someone could string loads of words together and create something that was so different from non-fiction. Images, people, entire worlds! In books I found so many things I couldn't find in real life. People I could understand because I could see the ways they ticked, they weren't closed off to me. Emotions, actions, everything explained. It took me years. and I'm not fully there in all honesty, to understand people in real life to the same degree. It was so much easier and more straightforward to read people in books rather than in real life. So I had that and I had an escape into a more pleasant environment than the one I found myself living in.
I gained an early preference for horror, fantasy and the supernatural. I think it was because more realist novels set in a our world was far from recognisable in comparison to the world that I lived in. It was close enough though that I could see what was wrong with the childhood I was living in and I didn't like that because I couldn't change it. I was aware of it as I was, I was the one living it after all so I went somewhere totally different. Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Goosebumps, horror stories, ghost stories. I absorbed words like a sponge, came to be able to tell a good short story from a mediocre one and had a desire to emulate them. I swear that my imagination grew as I grew older, the desire to create growing with it. My best friend had to put up with goodness knows how many wild plans of mine to stage such and such a play that I'd written or helping me construct stories involving miniature paper figures of Harry, Ron and Hermione that she kept in her pencil case in school.
I can't pinpoint when I started writing but I found it was such an easy way to express myself and to articulate my thoughts. Communicating verbally is a challenge. Either I don't know what to say, I say it wrong or I don't know how to express or explain an idea, an emotion or an argument. Even when I'm talking about something I'm confident about I tend to trip over words. On the other hand, writing words down gives me the chance to better gather my thoughts, to think about what I'm going to say and how I want to construct it. I usually write at speed without revising what I've said but I always find it works out a lot better for me than speaking does. It's like I can think more clearly when I see my thoughts on the page. Everything fits together so much better and in such obvious ways.
Most of the time I don't find what I've written to be particularly good. There are pieces I wrote only a few months ago that make me cringe and what to bury them forever but it was still good for me at the time. It allows me to express myself in ways I can't in everyday life. I learn things about myself in my writing too but more importantly people who want to get to know me can learn so much more from my writing than I'm ever likely to convey in real life. It's very difficult for me to express emotions. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that more often than not I'm not capable of emoting. My best friend who has known for how long? More than 12 years and she's never seen me cry as far as I can remember. Anger and happiness come to me with no problems and sometimes other emotions that are vastly different are expressed in the same ways as those two. That or I show no expression after all. Now try to explain to someone how deeply hurt you are by something when you seem totally impassive or tell something that's deeply upsetting to you while your face decides a smile is an appropriate expression. It's all there in my head but it somehow changes or gets lost as soon as I try to force it out of my mouth. With writing it's quite a different matter. I can get everything across and bring out emotions in myself while I'm writing.
My most recent forays in to writing have involved a site called Mizahar. It's a fantasy site that refers to itself as the Writer's RPG. You can create characters with lives similar to those in the real world with a few differences or have them as far removed from the world of normality as you like. I've been on it for more than a year and a half now, it'll be 2 years come the end of August and I feel as if my writing has flourished on it. What I want to get at though is what my characters express. My first character, Azira who resides in a domain on the site called Wind Reach, has so much of myself in her that it's genuinely terrifying. When I created her, I knew that I was consciously putting some of myself into her. She inherited my temper, the loss of a mother, my extreme distrust of men and some aspects of my past that helped to shape her. Within a few months though I realised that more of myself had come out her than I'd realised. She acquired my sexuality and the uncertainty that it comes with it, the walls I keep up for most people, the extreme desire to put trust in others, the extreme discomfort of being seen as overly feminine and a hatred for being looked down at and laughed about. There's even more of me in there but it'd make quite a long list and that's only one character. She has the most of me in her, good and bad qualities but if you add in the other two, you end up with a more rounded image of me. A penchant for sarcasm and witticisms that I tend to trip over when I try to say them in real life.
The short version of everything I've just written (I can't even remember most of it at this stage) is that the written word is highly important to me. A means of escape, a means of expression and an outlet for creativity. I suppose the written word also allows me to ramble in a somewhat articulate way that sometimes fails me in the world of verbal communication. More often than not though I can still ramble quite successfully writing like this. I mean, my blog posts should really attest to that fact.
And with that I should probably stop with the writing thing. Does anybody want to read this much of my nonsense anyway? If you've got down here then I guess I must be doing something, right?
Until I write again.
