The incomparable genius that is Kurt Vonnegut once said this about creating art:
“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”
Any art, he was so brilliant to say, as they all create growth in your soul. One has been doing so longer than any other for me, one has opened doors for another to take me around this world. One has been my companion, my therapist, my mirror. One, has been my salvation.
Writing.
Writing is such strange alchemy, an art form that creates something from nothing at all. It could be argued, and has, that writing is the one medium that truly creates something from nothing at all, in a material sense. You take invisible nothings, you spin them like Rumpelstiltskin, and turn them into something that can change everything.
Painting takes paint, takes canvas dried and stretched, takes brushes of wood and hair, takes paint of watercolor or acrylic, oil or even pastel. It takes something and turns it into something else. Baking the same, as you must begin with flour which began as wheat, you must add salt, then water, and after true magic and the tenderness of caring hands, bread is born. Music wishes only for instruments, for sound waves and fingers on strings or the brass of horns, the drumsticks, the bow of the fiddle, the piano keys or even the DJ turntables. Writing? Air. A spark. A feeling. A tiny fragment of hope. Somehow—stories are born.
Every time you write, every time you shape poetry, novels, essays, or short stories, you’re conjuring something from nothing at all. I suppose it could be argued that the “material” that writing necessitates is experience, is memory, is imagination, but I think I understand what those that say writing is unique in its lack of material needs. I think one could also argue that at the very least a stick and dirt, a bit of charcoal and paper, a typewriter and an old book page, are also necessary for writing to truly come to life. Maybe not in oral storytelling, in the passing of legend and myth across time, but I digress.
We’re not arguing any of these things today, as all art forms are vital, all cause our souls to grow as Vonnegut loved to say. Writing is just the one that brings you to me, the one that brings me to you. Writing is the one that constitutes 1/2 of the soul I possess, the other half belonging to photography. Writing is that conjuring, the taking of a thought, an ache, a whisper or a flicker of an idea before suddenly—it exists. Like magic, like alchemy.
I’ve often been asked my ‘process’ when it comes to writing and I have long felt horrible in trying to answer this question to those who are writers themselves. So often people ask me this and I can feel their desire to write more, to become more prolific in their output, and when all I can offer up in explanation is some variation of “I sit down and it falls out,” I wish I could do better. Only I can’t.
Some stare at blank pages and feel the same pressure they felt as teenagers tasked with writing an essay for a school book report. They stare at the blinking cursor and feel the ‘block’ that so many writers opine about. I feel sheepish when I am asked about this, too. “What do you do to overcome writer’s block?!” so many bravely raise their hands to ask at book signings or public meet & greets. I hate telling the truth, hate admitting that I’ve never had it, not once, and don’t have a single shred of solid advice on how to overcome it. I fudge it though, I tell them to start small—try blackout poetry so the enormity of the English language and all its words aren’t so intimidating, try just writing your own name over and again to remind your hand how to do so, hell, dip into stream-of-consciousness and let everything out. You’ll remember, I say, you’ll find it again.
For me, the block never comes because I have never sat down and “tried” to write. I have never forced it, never harnessed myself to any expectation or quantity (or quality) of output. I wait for the ache to build, I sit, and as the little poem above says, “I leak.” I just leak it out, all the “it” that has been building up for hours, days, weeks, or months. I write to express what I don’t know how to with photographs, and what needs to be let loose from my wild and unruly mind. I write, as the poem says below, to say I love you, I miss you, I want you to stay, I’m scared, I’m tired, lonely, bored, in awe, curious, elated, aroused, or amused. I write to travel through time, backwards for my melancholy meandering through nostalgia, forward if I understand that the words I have written will exist so long after I have gone. Somehow, these aches have ended up in bookstores, in magazines, in advertisements, in libraries—in the Library of Congress!—and I will never understand this, I will never call it anything short of magic.
Something, so many somethings, from nothing at all.
To write is to create, to pull it from the void. To write is to translate, thoughts, worries, hopes, dreams, fears, loves, and to make them understandable by all those who find them. Or that’s the hope, the aim, at the very least. There is a thread universal that is woven across the entire quilt of this place, one that unites us all, that snakes its way across, over, under, and through every soul that floats and calls this planet home. If writing truly is something from nothing, if writing truly is magic, then we all have this magic inside us. Everyone, everyone has magic inside them.
I throw life reboot and writing prompts on The Kindling (the paid-subscriber newsletter that goes out every Tuesday) to try to remind you of this. I prompt you because I want you to be reminded of that magic within you, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, even if you don’t particularly enjoy writing. I do so because every time you answer, every time you write a single sentence, you’re practicing that art—you’re making your soul grow. (You’re welcome)
This is what I wish for you, the embracing of your own creative spark. I care not if you write, if you paint, if you bake, or build. I care not if it’s good, if it’s publish worthy, if it’s absolute rubbish. I care not if it is poetry, prose, or nonsense. I just want you to embrace the alchemy that’s within you, for a reason, a simple reason I have no other way of saying than this:
Each and every time you write you’re leaving behind indisputable proof that you were here, that you existed against all odds, that you tried, that you gave, that in the end, you turned nothing into something after all.
Take the nothing, spin it, blow on it like dice, like dandelion seeds, and watch it grow. Watch it blossom.
Share with us your words, your stories, your soul. We’re here, and we cannot wait to see the flowers that come.
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From nothing it grows,
this perfect seedless blossom.
Writing is magic.
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