Slavery

...And so begins another blog, another shot at discipline, another forum to practice the art of writing. How beautiful, how delicate, are all the turnings of the english language! Their fluidity and consistency! Their grace and prose! Words become leveraged against eternity when they are committed to page; their life-span on the internet is less certain.

What is certain, though, is the force that language brings into the writing equation. To free the creativity of the mind, writers have been historically enslaved. They inflict a sort of bondage upon themselves: to choose one word here and another there, to use three words when four could do, to delete their favorite line for solidarity and to scour the thesaurus for another creative acquisition.

The truth of the matter is that everyone is a great writer, inside their mind. In fact, it's likely that even those who have never even considered writing are good writers in their minds! Writing is both an expression and a skill. To write is to find your voice and then constrict it; to free your inner creativity from the labyrinth of your mind and then enslave that expression back into the idea contained on the page.

Writing oscillates, then, between freedom and restraint. I read the carefully crafted ideas and ideals of ambitious authors, who have painstakingly formed their thoughts for my access. I am then released to think and believe; to ponder and consider, to agree or disagree. It most certainly provokes and inspires, but at a certain point I am again restrained to the writing. Unlike other forms of artistry, the words say what they will always say, and I will be restrained to their meaning.

For if this were not the case, books filled with jumbled characters edited by a monkey on a typewriter would be best-sellers; we could all free-associate our favorite memories and imaginations to the page, turning to one another to read lines, happy to pretend there was meaning in the mess. The young and old would read the same stories, and the work would be subject to the reader instead of the author. And the "q" would get equal use with the "e", assuming that the monkey mashes the keyboard without prejudice.

I choose to write, not because I have the best ideas for creative expression, but because I choose to restrain my creativity to the skill of communication. The artistic force behind writing, the spirit and the essence, is the feeling of a well-communicated thought. I now realize that to be a writer, you must choose to develop yourself as a communicator, refining the matter until it serves the limitless depths inside of everyone else.

I have chosen to practice my writing on a blog because it's less likely to be read that way, and because I won't be so distracted by all of the fonts. I am limiting myself to a time frame of thirty minutes of writing daily, so that I maintain healthy boundaries with the other elements of my life.

Even though writing can appear to be a form of slavery, I am choosing to engage in the exercise to see if a gift inside me can be freed. At a certain point, the exchange will be worth something grand, and I will be capable of expressing what was once an inexpressible thing. And then I will be free.

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