Just for Writers - Inspiration, Creativity, and How To

by Xiaoxiao Meng

My friends give me gifts of unique and beautiful blank writing journals

I’ve been writing since a pretty young age, young enough that anything I put on paper was a genius stroke—as long as I could spell all the words on the lined paper. Allowing my little fingers to wrap around the pencil grip at my desk, whether at home or at school, made me giddy. It launched me into a place my little child mind still couldn’t quite understand, a space where the room dissolved around me and all the magical things I could only picture before then took on comfortingly solid names.

Words made sense. They condensed the world before me into something graspable, but also so much more vivid. For a kid who couldn’t control anything that scared me (ghosts, the dark, moving and losing all my friends once every two years), writing promised security, but also adventures. My characters faced off against scary things, and they won.

I enjoy comfortable ballpoint pens for writing

Physically speaking, writing itself has become a lot less messy for me nowadays. Instead of pencil granite crumbling all over my pages and smudging against the side of my hand, I now enjoy the relative comfort of ballpoint pens and laptops. All my friends know to gift me lined notebooks with big pages and colorful pens. (I’m not actually artistic, but I appreciate anything colorful.) I love the speed and convenience of typing things out on a computer, but there’s still a tender spot in my cynical writer’s heart for how tactile pens feel in the hand, pressed against the page, seeing my handwriting on the page.

Even if it all eventually ends up in tidied-up Word fonts, I enjoy writing shorter pieces out by hand. They tumble onto the page in rougher shape, but oftentimes that messiness is what gives them their spark, that same childish spark I felt first in the classroom.

Obviously more than that has changed. The days when I made up stories about princesses and dragons, or even my favorite anime characters (please don’t ask) are long gone. No more teachers are around to correct my writing posture. And I’m officially too old to be cute to adults when I tell them I want to be a writer when I grow up.

Now I have plenty of fears that even fairytales won’t help me escape from.

Even writing itself isn’t as simple as when I was younger. Sure, it can be enjoyable, even comforting.

But unlike kid-me, I know that a lot of good writing doesn’t come from writing about nice things. Sometime writing gets to be too much for me. I need to pull away for a bit, or even a while. I’ve written stories that dip so deep under my thick grownup skin that just for a bit the child came out, wide-eyed in fear as ever.

And I think that’s the same reason it pulls me back. Because as adult-me now knows, the scary part isn’t being afraid of the monster around the corner. The scary part is no longer thinking, for a moment, that such a wonderful and frightening world no longer dwells out there.

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