find my voice

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
– Edwin Schlossberg

We use words to craft our thoughts. We write to give those thoughts shape and power. Good writing is an art, like painting or sculpting. Crafted words have power. Well crafted words have the power of creation and destruction.

I don’t write on lined paper. It limits how much I can write and where it occupies space on the paper.

In a softly-light music hall, I sat on the floor behind D. We listened to the musicians on stage. I don’t know what they were playing, only that it was amazing and for a while I was lost in the inspiration and things flowed. D looked over his shoulder once and asked if everything was okay. I nodded as I wrote and remembered how to write. It was the Missouri stage in Rotterdam. It was the Kurt Rosenwinkel trio on stage. It was one of those moments that life is supposed to be about. No wonder it inspired me.

Perhaps some creative people can be creative without external influences but I think most creative people become that way and grow better in the presence of other creative people. Cutting them off from those others is like denying a potted plant water. Eventually there will be no inspiration and the creative spirit will die.

You can’t find inspiration in a vacuum.

I don’t know how most people write. My writing grows in fits and starts at time. I will rework a post multiple times before I publish it but I rarely change it after that.

Some times the words just flow, no editing needed.

Tonight, as I wrote a piece on finding things you need at just the right time, I struggled to find an appropriate title. In my reworking of the opening sequence, I added a metaphor for emphasis. Then, all of a sudden, I had my title.

All I had to do was not force it

I was going to write tonight. I put on some Santana and took a shower to rinse away the sticky layer of today’s humid weather. I have nothing pending and no distractions and there’s some stuff that’s been bumping around upstairs… But when I sit down to write, everything gets quiet. I’ve been struggling to find words of late, to build complex thoughts. Perhaps because my life has lost some of its integrity, it reflects in my writing.

I had a rough go of things from the 27th of March thru the 11th of May. I stopped writing. I got lost. So today I am practicing. I will finish 2 new posts for my wordpress site this weekend. These aren’t new post per say. I began them almost a month ago and lacked the energy to finish them. It speaks to how badly I hurt and how lost I was.

You see writing is a part of who I am. That I faded that much speaks to the depth of loss I felt. The writing is therapy. The writing is finding pieces of me. The writing is restoring me.

So forgive me if the quality seems lacking of late. I am relearning this part of me.

I often can’t finish post I’ve started, even though I start full of ideas. The initial inspiration thins the way cigar smoke disperses: the longer it takes me to get the thoughts down, the less of the original inspiration remains. The scent from the cigar still lingers, reminding me of the ideas but the form no longer exists. So it is harder.

One of the reasons people write is they’ve experienced something so amazing they feel others should have an opportunity to feel that same experience.

One of the reasons people read is that the amount of experiences we can have in one life time is limited by so many factors and reading about other experiences gives us an opportunity to go place we mightn’t have otherwise found.