Aspiration

September 17, 2008

Most mornings, I settle in front of my adorable Mac iBook and read email and blogs. (Eventually, when I take the time to do it, there will be a list alongside my main blog entries of stuff I love online, blogs I read regularly.) This morning, after I saw my husband off to work, took a short walk down the street that ends at our house, talking to my younger brother on the phone, I fixed my coffee and read about a woman's Tuesday.

This, I thought, this! is the way I want to write.

I've been writing for a long, long time. I've blogged about my writer's journey more than once, so I'll refrain from nostalgic repetition. I love the feel of a pen in my hand, scribbling across paper. I love ink, how it makes swoops and swirls that link together and form words that carry thoughts. I love typing fast as lightning (sometimes), words parading across the computer's screen. I love to read my own writing, even the shit, love to know my own ability to create.

So often my own writing seems elementary to me. How can that be after so many years of practicing at it? My writing voice seems like a teenager's, still. Is it that I'm not sophisticated? Do I know enough big words? Do I cower at the threshold of saying what I need to say?

I don't want to copy anyone else's style. That would be an insult to myself as well as the other writer. But I do aspire to richer language, the ease and flow of good writing that comes from the pen (or keyboard) being an extension of my own body. I want to write about life, my experience, in a universal way that people read and nod and think--like I do, reading other people's writing--"Wow."

Writing is craft, no doubt about that, and like any other craft, there needs to be practice, and there needs to be a devotion, measured at least in part by time spent doing it. Much of my writing on this blog is off the cuff, jotted at the end of a long day, in front of the television, or scattered across the screen over morning coffee, over my usual breakfast of oatmeal pancake with cherries, nuts and chocolate chips.

It used to be that I spent a great deal more of my time to writing. I remain in lust with language, savoring words and their meanings and origins. Still, my time is spent doing this or that, and writing gets shoved aside in favor of other things. Perhaps it is like a garden neglected. There will still be the occasional bright burst of floral color, but the weeds take over.

And aspiration can be a very effective collection of gardening tools, if I'll only put it to good use.