What Writing Means To Me
Sitting here, trapped by the confines of an office job that slowly and steadily leeches the spirit from my soul, I’m inclined to discuss the reasons that writing is a favorite pastime, a hobby, and a dream.
First and foremost, writing is an escape. As someone who suffers from depression, anxiety, and I’m sure a list of other mental health issues that have yet to be fully realized, looking for a way to escape reality for a bit has always been a top priority. There have been many attempts. Video games, movies, TV shows, you name it, I’ve binged them. I’ve spent weeks watching entire series, losing myself in the world created on the screen. I’ve immersed myself in specific genres of movies, watching one after the other, learning and absorbing everything I can from them. At one point, I spent around six months watching nothing but documentaries, finding every subject imaginable that interested me and diving into it. Nothing, however, has provided the amount of happiness that reading — and subsequently writing — have provided for me.
When I was younger, I was the boy in school that always had an extra book with him. Between class, during class, and at home, I was buried in the pages of a story at almost all times. I devoured books like a starving man tasting food for the first time in months. The ability to travel into an entirely different universe, develop close relationships with the people between the pages, watch as their entire world was upended and they struggled to make things right again. It was the perfect escape. Especially with my preferred genre being horror and thriller novels, getting sucked into those was a roller-coaster of tension and release that captivated me.
As I got older, free time for reading came at a premium, there was always something taking my attention away. The long nights spent curled in bed, claiming “Just one more chapter and then I’ll sleep” when I knew that wouldn’t be the case, were slowly becoming a thing of the past. However, as I spent less time consuming words, I spent more time wanting to create my own. Every few months an idea would light a fire in my brain, and I’d sit and throw letters on a page for a night. When I was finished, I’d have a mishmash of words, imitations of my favorite writers, strewn about in a vaguely coherent form of story. A lot of them made no sense. Some were only created because of a gimmick I’d thought would be fun to write around. Many were never shared with anyone.
Then came the fall of 2019. Writing had been a distant thought for me for a few years, life was hectic and stifling, depression was rearing it’s head yet again, and hope seemed to be retreating. My day job was going well, but with an ample amount of downtime, I began searching for way to distract myself throughout the day. In doing so, I rediscovered books. The passion reignited. I read 3–4 books in the span of a week, new releases from my favorite authors, suggestions from friends with similar tastes. At the end of it, my mind was racing with new stories, new friends, new emotions.
At some point, I had a specific idea for a story I wanted to read. A story from the perspective of a serial killer. To dive into the mind of a person like that, see their reasoning, follow them through daily life as well as the gruesome basement of their mind. After looking around, there seemed to be a few stories out there with the concept, but skimming through them, none caught my attention. Then one day, bored and giving up on the search, an idea came to me. Why not write my own?
With that, I quickly penned out a 5 to 6 page story, the tale of a man stalking a woman in a park, waiting for the right moment to take her. I was impressed with the way it had come out. When I was done, I gave it out to a few friends to read, more out of boredom and a want to share my idea than anything else. The story ended in a bit of a cliffhanger as I really didn’t know where to go with it. The feedback that I received was a unanimous “Well, you need to finish this now”. So I set to work. For three weeks, I wrote, discovering a story in my head that I had no idea was there. Characters I’d never met before grew before my eyes. The main character developed from (insert victim for the killer) to a woman that I honestly didn’t want to see die. The story grew and at the end of three weeks, a 6 page short story had turned into a 27,000 word story of survival. At that point, I was hooked and interested in calling it complete. I spent the next month learning the basics of self publishing; creating a cover for it using free tools online, finding a few beta readers to give feedback on the story, suggest possible changes, additions, tweaks. And when all was said and done, I published it, putting it out for the world to see. I didn’t know what to expect, but feedback received was good all around. It was rough — I hadn’t revised much, dialogue punctuation was something I’d thought I’d remembered from school but obviously didn’t — but I’d done it, and people were proud, enthused, and seemed to like it.
Since then, I think I’ve been trying to recapture the magic of that three week period of creation. I’ve been met with differing results. Ideas for novels have cropped up here and there, either being too big to tackle or to small to work out. I’ve attempted short stories (some of which may eventually get posted here) with a similarly varying degree of success. Now we’re onto…well, whatever we can call this? A blog post? An essay? The ramblings of a man that knows not where he is headed? Whatever it is, it seems as viable as all the other options. Because in the end, it’s creation, expression, escape from the mundane. It brings me back to the comfortable feeling of being curled up in bed, warm under a blanket, feeling the coarse paper under my fingers as I turn the page, whispering to myself “Just one more chapter and I’ll go to bed” even though I still know it’s a lie.
