You start with a hunk of marble or a slab of ice and you carve away all the unnecessary rock or frozen water until you find the sculpture within.

That’s essentially my process when it comes to creating.

When I sit down and everything lines up and the planets are out in space doing what they do, it takes such little time to actually get in the mood. When I sit down to create, I am in the mood to create. With a blank screen in front of me, I want to fill it up. Starting, adding in spaces, pulling punctuation out of nowhere, it’s all a modest experiment, but every moment of it feels like I am working towards a goal. The blank page is my block of untouched marble.

Just as every marble statue doesn’t end up being David, every blank page won’t end up as something publishable, or even readable. I go into this process understanding that, and I hope you go into reading this blog about my process knowing that I understand that… on part two.

Let’s begin where I started. This is the point where I decided to write.

In my senior year of high school my English teacher told me I should be a writer.  This was the first time someone told me I was good enough at something that I could do it for a career. So I ran with it.

Up to this point I’d only ever received questions form my parents or teachers about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go in life. The moment this teacher, a woman well along in the way of life experience, told me I had talent something clicked inside of me. From that moment on I wasn’t sure about anything except that I wanted to be a better writer.

Flash forward a few years, I graduated from college with a degree in English with a focus in creative writing. This one person’s kind words, the fact that my English teacher took the time to pull me aside and tell me I was good, drove me to become who I am today. As I sit here and type this all out, I’m astounded at how malleable I was as a seventeen-year-old, and how little it took to shape the rest of my life. If she’d merely written, “Good job!” underneath my ‘A’ on the top of the essay, who knows what I would be doing.

I often imagine what it would be like if I used the written word to make a living. Would I enjoy writing if I had to do it to pay rent, go on vacations and have fun, or would I chalk it up to something I do just to make my way in the world?  Would I want to write if I had to?

That brings me to the second subject of the second part of this blog about my process. The Why.

Why do I write.

I recognized a few weeks back that I was depressed. At this point in my life, I’d achieved a massive career goal I’d set for myself in a much shorter time than I’d thought possible. I’d just moved to a city that had everything I could imagine wanting, and I was now capable of taking on a lot more personal responsibility than ever. What made me depressed was the fact that I didn’t know what to do with myself.

For my entire life I knew what to do next; Go to school, get a job to pay bills, apply on better jobs to make paying bills easier, it all seemed pre-determined. The passed two years I’d spent making small choices based on the end-game that I could eventually get the job I now have. For two years I had a drive for something bigger.

When I got that something bigger, it actually felt pretty small.  There was no massive euphoric state to accompany it, there was no chiming of a bell in my head followed by cheering and whooping, and there was barely a congratulations you did it. In fact, no one seemed to really care. Even me.

This was not something I realized all at once. I am not that self aware. In fact, this took me about two months to realize. And it took me another month to learn how to understand this feeling. 

Writing helps. When I get to sit down and put my thoughts on a page and read through them and have others read through them, it makes me feel solid. Counter to that, when my ideas are floating around in my head and intangible, I feel as though I don’t have a grounding to the world.

Often, I feel this way at work. I find myself drifting throughout the day, not focused or thinking clearly, and I’ll pull up a word document on a computer and spill my guts. This might come in the form of a little story or a big confessional blog post like this one. And afterwards, I feel as though I got something out, something that was making me feel sad and lonely and isolated. Suddenly, with this thing out of me, I am able to get on with my day and interact with other people in a normal way.

The fact that I can focus on my craft and scribble away in notebooks or click at a keyboard and create thrills me. I love it. I really, really love it. And with this blog I can share it with anyone who wanders by. This ability to release my ideas out into the world has added a whole new level of enjoyment to my process. In fact, it is this enjoyment that ensures I take great care that what I publish is up to snuff. Because I value this process so highly, I decidedly cannot take it for granted.

Let’s talk about editing. I come from a generation where publishing online is easy. Anyone with a computer and access to the internet can publish their writing online. This means that there are so many ideas out in the world. This is as daunting as it is encouraging for me.  Sometimes I feel as though I am just another person voicing his ideas.  I have to consider that there are a lot of other people out there that may have the same ideas, or similar ones, and are capable of sharing them better or in a more interesting way. This also means that there is a lot of garbage out there.

Sorry to put it so bluntly, reader, but I wanted to get it out without beating around a bush.

As a reader of internet articles, I’ve been in the position where I have read about two-thirds the way through one of those articles only to realize that none of the ideas were grounded in fact and the writing read as though the author hadn’t bothered to read what they wrote before publishing it.

Looking at the fact that publishing online is so easy, I spawned my first ground rule: I would read and re-read everything I publish on this blog until find no flaw. Then I would consider the post as an outsider would. If I saw no issue with the post, I would publish it.

One thing you should know about me to understand how much of a commitment this is: I hate to read my own writing.

Self-editing my work is an arduous and tedious task, but I do it, and I’ll keep doing it because I respect you. You’re the one who found this blog, and I want you to feel as though I put a lot of work into sharing with you. I want you to understand that I care about what you read.

I am hopeful for this outlet that I have discovered because I love to write. It’s how I heal. I write because I understand the written word. I understand how to pull two ideas together on a page. I love that I can show people whatever I want just by chipping away at a blank page. I write because an English teacher once told me I was good enough to write at a point in my life when I didn’t think I was good enough to do anything. If you’re at that point, reader, if you feel like you can’t do anything right, I’m here to tell you that there is something out there, some small and obvious thing that you can do in a different way from everyone else. It’s this small thing that makes all the heartache and the headaches and the long days and cold nights all worthwhile.  I was so fortunate to have found that one person who encouraged me at just the right time in just the right place.

I hope you found this two-part post about my process as enjoyable being a reader as I did being its writer.  As always, thanks for stopping by. Until next time, reader.