New York Times best selling author H. Jackson Brown once said “Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin and inspiration will find you”. In reference to my last post where I wrote about having severe writer’s block, I wish I would have seen this quote earlier. Perhaps the writers block wouldn’t have gotten as bad as it did. I had inspiration but could not write anything that meant anything to me. As a result, I just stopped writing and made excuses for why I wasn’t.
Last saturday I competed at the Assembly of God Fine Arts festival. The piece I wrote and performed for the competition was not finished until exactly a week before the competition. Some spoken word poets may see this as normal but I, an amateur who had two months to write this piece, felt so much pressure and if I did not finish it when I did, which was at the last possible second, I have no idea what I would have done.
The reason this piece took so long to write was not because of lack of inspiration or even writers block, it was an inability to write self significant material. In my mind, I thought, ‘If what I write doesn’t mean anything to me, how could it possibly mean anything to anybody else?’ I wrote one poem, and the words came easily and I convinced myself that this was meaningful and I felt something from it. Now, I just feel like I wanted it to resignate so much I fooled myself into feeling feelings that were not there. When I read my poem to my friend, he told me to stop fishing for words and to write about something that really set a fire in me. It was then I realized what I had been doing. Fishing for words that didn’t mean anything that I convinced myself to have meaning was exactly what was holding me back. So I wrote the poem that was very hard to write where words were hard to find but maybe that’s how I knew it was real, not fake or staged.
I wrote the piece I performed as a conversation I never got to have. I took it as a chance to tell this person everything I never got to say without them interrupting. When practicing my presentation of the poem I also ran into trouble in sounding like I was acting. Trying to sound real and figuring out what that sounded like when I took all my tips from spoken word I have watched on youtube. It was the difference between telling and acting and this difference is what showed that this piece truly made me feel. If I wrote a piece that I could only pretend feeling for through acting it out, it’s not really me who wrote it.
Through this process, I have learned what writing really means to me, and how it is my form of self expression. Writing in the style of spoken word and performing is something I feel not a lot of people would ever expect out of me, which is a reason I love it so much.
I challenge whoever may read this to find the one thing you love, the thing that allows you to express yourself the most, and keep it just for yourself and whoever you choose to show it to. Keep people guessing and leave them speechless when they learn of the greatness you are capable of.
Also, writers block is real but inspiration is endless, you just have to find it and you will do so by continuing to search. You will never find anything if you do not look for it.
thetiredblog 