Keep your heart safe and your writing spontaneous

 “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

What I am constantly thinking about are the ways in which I must tell these stories, especially since a certain kind of readership and relevance is important to me. 

It's been months since I last wrote on this blog. I created my blog spontaneously and it is this spontaneity that has sustained it ever since. Of all the 58 posts I have written on here, only few of them were actually ‘planned.’ There is a surge before any post is written. I am not one of those writers who sit down and draft and plan, it just never works for me. Some of the best ideas I have gotten, even outside the writing space, did not come from planning and scheduling. It is usually me mindlessly scrolling on the internet or watching something till I have an aha moment that sends me to google doc or my notepad or WhatsApp( yes I text myself like myself is another person) Sometimes it's a dream. I have dreamt a poem before. I woke up and wrote it and it was fire. Sometimes it's during my Bible study or prayer time, I may be inspired to write a poem about grief because I read about empty jars in the Bible. The mention of fine fabric in the Bible may inspire a short story about warmth. I am going somewhere. 

There is a creator I recently started following on Instagram, Keyede, and I really love her content. Her video on procrastination made me wrestle with my thoughts a little bit. She spoke about the sudden 3:am resolution we have to get our lives in order after wasting valuable time doing something unimportant and how it is not sustainable.  In her words,

“ If you are honest and self aware enough, you will admit that these spontaneous intervention schemes, they don't work”

Don’t they?

She also used words like habitual and repetitive, both words I cannot fully associate with my writing process. Is my writing habitual, is it repetitive? If I am to be a successful writer should it be?

I listened to Adele talk about songwriting in an interview with Apple Music and she said,

“Whenever I have a successful writing session or it's not really a session, it always comes at a really akward point in my day. I always try and pinpoint what it is exactly that has made that song end up being finished and me thinking it's good enough to be on a record to play to people, and I always try to work out what it is so I can sort of jar it and then use it whenever I wanna write a song but I never can.” 

She goes on to talk about how her ideas come spontaneously, often in the middle of the night. Now read Adele’s words again in the context of your writing experience, replace song with story and ‘on a record to play to people’ with ‘published in literary magazines for people to read.’  Stay with me. 

I started actively submitting my writing to lit mags & presses when my writer friend sent me a message on WhatsApp, during our writing workshop together. I had read one of my poems in the workshop and according to her the poem was so good she tried to find more of my writing online but there weren't that many pieces,  but then she found my blog and saw that I wrote a lot here. She wanted to know if I did it on purpose. If I was one of those writers who only preferred to publish their own pieces without caring about the visibility that submitting to literary magazines could bring. My answer was no. I just had not been fully indoctrinated into the world of submitting to magazines and saying "attached below are five shorts,” or  checking if my work has changed to ‘in progress’ on submittable or waiting as long as six months to get either a rejection or acceptance. We talked about it and I started actively submitting. Like crazy. Like everywhere. 

In that same interview Adele goes on to say that being an artist comes from deep within us and it is a necessity that we have to put it out. She feels as though art has become a transaction, a trade. On one hand,  I understand but on the other writers, artists and creatives must eat. Is it even possible to draw a line between passion and trade when you desire to make the passion a source of livelihood?

I confess that the reason I stopped posting on my blog as much is because I am fighting. I am debating a lot of things. When I get a writing idea, I am immediately thinking about which lit mag to submit it to, if it fits their aesthetic, if I would get an acceptance. I would observe something and want to spontaneously make a blog post about it and just remember that there is a submission guideline I read that somehow suggests my observation would be a good fit. I legit used to write full blown short stories on this blog before and it was amazing. I don’t think I can anymore. I am constantly thinking of places to submit them to, almost like I feel my stories are more credible if they are published elsewhere. The thing about being in this unhealthy headspace is that I am getting nothing done. The urgency and spontaneity that fueled  my writing has been slowed down by the desire to have a certain type of status as a writer, and this type of  desire can quickly become a bland burden because it is no longer about what I want to share out of love for my craft but what is best suitable for a world someone else has created. I  like to think my writing flows from God to me and that the flow will never stop, that I write from a place of abundance but I keep contradicting myself by rationing my writing at the expense of status and visibility. All I do these days is bookmark open calls  and watch as their deadlines come and go. I am not actively blogging or submitting to lit mags, so Adele might be onto something with all this talk about trade. 

Sometimes I wish I could jar the things that made up one great story and recycle it to make more and better stories that will grow wings and fly into the world by themselves so I don’t have to do the choosing and waiting. Leave me and my wishful thinking(insert tears)

If at this point you are waiting for me to arrive at one big teaching moment or to hear what I am doing to navigate this, I am doing nothing. Okay this is something; this spontaneous purgation of  emotion that has become this blog post is something. I am also trying to just write without thinking of a home for the work. I think it’s a big mistake writing to appease an audience. As much as writers want to be read, Writing for readership is a risky thing. Readership cannot be the only foundation for which your writing stands. It is not solid to write solely for readers who might see your work and decide to go a separate way. It is safer to write first for yourself. Let the fulfillment be innate; for you first. Like Toni Morrison so graciously put it, 

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it”  

As selfish as it sounds, let it be you first. Write whatever feels like purpose to you. Tell the stories you want to tell, stories that matter to you.

This is a note to self really. I hope to look back at this post a year from now and be proud that I had the courage to stop seeking validation and just create. And I hope this is your testimony too if you can relate to this. If you read up to this point, thank you. And as always this post was all over the place. But I hope you got the drift. Bye