Creativity

By MATT

It's not easy to find time to write. Whether its because of work, school, volunteering, or hanging out with friends, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to sit down and start typing, writing, dictating, making cuneiform tablets, etching in stone - or whatever method you use to express yourself.

Yet it's important to find the time. I don't do it enough and sometimes I think I'm poorer for it. Whenever I do sit down and start typing, I'm amazed at what happens. I never know what direction my fingers are going to take me. It's always a journey. Sometimes it's deeply personal, expressing some long repressed emotion or reaction to an event. Writing can be quite cathartic. It's helped me over more than one hump in life.

The are times what you write is pretty cut and dried. News stories, for example, can often only go in one direction. Sometimes though you find them going in unexpected tangents. You get the best stories that way.

Often what I write stinks. I go back erase the whole darn thing and start over. Most of the time it's the third or fourth attempt at a story that sets me down the path. But whether your story is good or not is not the point of the exercise. Discovery is.

Sometimes writing's funny. You sit back at the end of a story, laugh, and wonder just exactly what deep recess of your brain it came from.

No matter what type of writing I ultimately end up doing, all stories have one thing in common. I've learned something about myself. And that makes me richer.