Musing on Writing

I've been reminiscing a lot lately. I've always done that, but these moments when you make big life changes cause that to be so much more intense. It makes you appreciate what you have, what the world around you contains.

I've been thinking a lot about what I used to do back in high school, during classes that I found boring. I'd write these stories, all very short, I couldn't write something that had a plot for the life of me. They'd be just a description of a situation, either one I'd noticed and spent time examining in real life, or this imaginary situation I'd want to encounter one day, trying to figure out how I'd respond to it, what I would bring to that situation.

I'd describe scenes, and then rewrite the same paragraph over and over and over again, trying to find better words to describe the things I thought were important, trying to impart some emotion onto a description of people sitting in a room, of people walking past buildings on a street. I'd try to turn it from something meaningless and everyday into something that was new and unique, filled with feeling, in the way Nabokov in his autobiography was able to make catching butterflies as a young boy in a Russian forest sound magical and filled with emotion that he's able to impart on the reader.

I haven't done that for a long time - just sitting down and spending an hour on a single paragraph, just for my joy. Most writing I do as an adult is very perfunctory, a means to an end: a company blog post about a product launch, a support article or an email to set up a meeting.

I want to go back to a place where I feel like I have the time to just write for myself, not with the goal of publishing it for the world to see. This blog is a bit like that: I never expect anyone to read most of what I publish on here, it's an archive of things I learn and emotions I want to store for safekeeping. But writing for my blog is still a means to an end, trying to make writing something 'productive' that forms an end product that could be consumed.

I want to go back to scribbling in a notebook, writing stories just for the sake of exercising the creative part of my brain, between class notes with physics formulas and misspelled French words.