If I waited until I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.
~ Anne Tyler
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ometimes reading can be detrimental
to your health. Your creative health,
that is.
Take this blog for instance. There are just two posts for 2016 and
although I have been writing off and on for the past six months, I have not
been sharing any of my thoughts or musings except with a small circle of
writers.
And I think one of the reasons is
because I read too much.
The majority of writers ~ most
certainly all the writers I know personally or have interviewed ~ write because
they cannot help themselves. To put pen
to paper or fingertips to the keyboard is to breathe fresh air. If we do not write, something precious inside
withers away. Of course, as with any
passionate pursuit, there are days when writing is more of a chore, when no
word seems right, when the ideas and thoughts flow like a mud-swollen
creek. Yet even then, if I do not write something, I go to bed feeling
incomplete.
Yet even on those days when the
words simply won’t dance in unison for me, even when writing is something I
have to force myself to do in the moment, the joy I experience when I write is
still there. Because once the words are
being written, joy kicks in.
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| Image: © Luisa Vallon Fumi |
Writing then becomes the platform or stage where I perform rather than the writing itself taking the spotlight.
So I became obsessed with publishing
only those pieces that were “relevant” and would “get the most likes.” But because I’m an intuitive feeler, that
translated into “nothing I write is relevant or good enough and no one is
listening anyway.” Well, Mikaela, maybe people have stopped listening because you never
hit the publish button anymore.
I think that the more we try to be
‘relevant” the more our art suffers. And
this applies whether we express ourselves via the written word, on canvas, in
clay, on the dance floor, or in the recording studio. Honestly, have you ever seen or heard a work
of art and thought, “Wow, that piece of art is so relevant right now!” Of course not! We experience art and take it in and say
things like, “That painting speaks to my heart in some way,” or “His music
moved me to tears,” or “I was mesmerized by her book and couldn’t put it down!”
Something I say will move you or
touch you or enrage you or calm you or make you cry. But that is immaterial to the creative act
itself. I hope my words elicit those reactions, but I would still write even
if I were the last rational being on the planet.
Because I write for the sheer joy
that the dance and play of words brings me.
And that joy packs its little bags
and goes on vacation if I’m too caught up in clicks and likes and number of
views. For a while that meant that I wrote
sporadically and only my writing group saw my work. For the past month, I’ve been writing daily
and still my writing group has only seen the results. But that re-discovered daily writing habit
opened my eyes to what I’d been missing ~ the joy. And suddenly, I don’t care if I hit publish
and still no one reads my words. I don’t
care if what I write and publish here will only get five or six likes ~ all
from my writing group.
The most important thing I can do
here is simply share the joy of my art.
And hope that by sharing it, I inspire that joy in someone else. But if not, the Muse will not leave me
because no one reads what I have written.
The Muse only grows sad and leaves when I cease to create and share the
joy.
Oremus pro invicem,
~
Mikaela
Posts on La Belle are written with the following fonts: Georgia, Times New Roman, Vivaldi, Edwardian, and occasionally Baroque Script.
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