003 | Writing to Help Me Speak
Why I will be writing (almost) daily.
I want to write more, I really do. I think it will be nice to look back on and maybe, just maybe, it will help me speak a little more eloquently. I am an ESL student’s worst nightmare, talking a mile a minute, often having to go back on what I said to explain myself and then getting lost in these rabbit holes of explanations, only coming up for air once I see eyes starting to glaze over. I am jealous of comedians who can talk so smoothly, so wittily, that everyone can understand them on the first run. I need to speak slower. I’ve been told that my entire life, and maybe writing will help me with that. I write a lot slower than I talk.
Every day, I write in a journal, and I have for years. Some days I write pages and pages and others, it’s just a to-do list. I’m not following The Artist’s Way; they aren’t morning pages. If I just extend this process a bit more, and write here rather than scribble in my notebook, I think it might help.
When I was a kid, I used to love writing. I mostly wrote songs and poems, always trying to be more grown up than I actually was. I loved the storytelling aspect. As I got older, I stopped. Maybe it was the change in my media consumption, a diet that consisted of YouTube videos and TV shows featuring troubled high school students I badly wanted to relate to and never could. Now, I want to take that same feeling back, getting into a flow state.
I want to keep the lack of barriers for my writing practice, like I do in my journal, and I want to do it five days a week and not the weekends, so it can fit right into my routine. I try to touch my laptop as little as possible over the weekends and I just know if I open it to do this, I would never get off. I have a hold on my calendar right now from 9 to 10 am. The perks of working with a lot of west coast people is being able to ease into my day and this can be part of it. Today I was twenty minutes late to the desk because I had to pick up my dry cleaning, but even 40 minutes of writing could help. On Tuesdays, I will write my other newsletter, which is less of a brain dump and more of a corralling of news that I find interesting.
I think about people who are able to write books. Sure, anyone can write one but not everyone does. It requires mental tenacity and finding a throughline in it all, whether that be the theme of a medical textbook or the storyline of a romance novel. Sitting down and just doing it is what separates those who have written a book and those who have not. Of course, publishing it is a different story. I am sure that’s a difficult part that I’m not taking into account.
Where I lack in spoken clarity, I make up for in sitting down and doing the damn work. You would be surprised how many people sit down and say they are going to do something and then don’t. So many people have dreams and aspirations that are crushed, not due to the lack of time or resources, but the absolute distraction that they let themselves fall into. I hope that my ability to stick to a routine and do the work, even on days like today where writing doesn’t seem that interesting and my brain feels empty, carries me.
I don’t have an end goal. Maybe I’ll write 100 issues and see how my writing changes over time. That might be fun.