Enforced Creativity

I remember so many random facts and incidents from my life and others’ which I’d witnessed or heard of.. It seems such a waste if I just kept them in a vault in my head. I shall post them on here and hope that, one day, I would be able to organise them and give them some semblance.. Perhaps I’ll even sketch a faint pattern of my thoughts.. What do I most think about? Whatever it is, I’m making it my aim to write about it here..

When I was 15, I was aimlessly staring at one of the mismatching bookcases that adorned our living room.. My eyes were drawn to a book in the lower shelves.. I knelt and tilted my head to the right so I could make out what it was that was tugging at my eyesight.. The cover was a 1950s shade of green.. It was a dense hardback that looked and felt like it had been read a lot.. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 by Sylvia Plath. The name sounded familiar.. I would not go so far as to say that it was an epiphany, but something came on to me and I wouldn’t put the book down. I sat on the sofa and proceeded to read.. As I found out about the author, it dawned on me that a poem of hers, Mirror, is included in the poetry anthology I was studying in English.. I was touched by her sincerity and vulnerability, though I don’t think she was conventionally vulnerable.. She wasn’t at risk of some external danger. Her world, like mine, seemed dotted with signposts, all directing her towards an impenetrable dead-end. My posthumous crush’s style was spellbinding.. I would pause and sigh at the improbability of my ever possessing skill and spirit like she did.. The authorial voice, a literary term I would later learn, was unapologetic but equally unnerved.. Her vulnerability wasn’t weakness, it was self-doubt. The question of whether or not her talent was real busied her already ceaseless mind and it pushed her senses to the precipice and, eventually, off it.

What triggered this impromptu mini essay is that in one of the letters ‘Sivvy’ wrote to her mother, she mentioned with some fervour that she would polish her work by writing 1500 words a day.. Maybe this is the kind of regime I should enforce to yield more writing.. The experience of living shouldn’t have to end before it is documented.. The more I write now, the more I can capture.. It would bring me endless satisfaction and, with some luck, it wouldn’t cost me my dear followers.. Even if it did, at least I’d have written instead of just wanting to write..

Although this post comes up to merely a third of my target word count, it’s a start. With time, my writings shall be more regular, extensive and generally better, I would hope.