an (un)known force

thoughts on the transitional effects of writing

I am putting my hand in the box. I am being dealt cards by an ominous stranger. I’m running through the fields trying to find someone, anyone, for reassurance. I am walking onstage, about to improvise because I don’t know the choreography.

When my finger taps keys or when I pick up a pen, I’m not sure what will happen next. Must the process always be so more daunting than where I am heading? I must keep at it, I know that. Though the changing moons of what I once was is dawning on me – there is no going back for me now. Once you gaze at the stares longer than you ought, the twinkle is so memorable. So enigmatic. It moves you so, in turn calling yourself a stargazer; you could never have foretold this happening, but it is.

That is why I write. In some strange way, I don’t put work into fruition, it just happens. I don’t organise, the only aid for myself is the shortest synopses known to man. So and so gets revenge, he feels this and that, reflections on nuances that even I don’t know how I’ll conceptualise yet. Writing happens to me. Very cliche, I am aware.

However, I am also aware of the fact that it’s still fresh. Younger me would’ve scoffed at the thought of grouping words to create something. So, yes, in the past year, it has made me starstruck that I do have some essence of the family’s creativity in me. This realisation may be exciting and flimsy but there is a stickiness to it. Every other young writer in Britain is also conceptualising their nuanced experience, so how far do I have to go until I catch up with those who started writing since they were scarcely prepubescent?

I soon came to the conclusion that those were unrealistic questions to be asking myself. The real dilemma I was having was one of un-determinability. I want my work to be seen though I know I will have to leap, even if every fibre is evicted from comfort. The ‘leap’ per se is to face rejection head-on and welcome the era of revisions, mending, and perfecting. But most importantly, write. I need to stop thinking and see where the chorus of tapping fingers will take me next.

So as I dive deeper, I enter a transgression of this skill I have unveiled myself to. Read the first few lines, I am anxiously walking into the misty forest of what-not, plucking my new-found ideas from the bare trees. A magical forest with decaying trees, yet the branches still produce these ripe forces of knowledge and interest. The act and beauty of writing never fail to amaze me.

I am ready for what is to come. I am ready to write.