The Final Hurrah

I almost can't believe that I'm finally writing this final post. The summer has gone by excruciatingly fast. I want to beg for a little more time before I have to head into my senior year of university. I'm caught between wanting to just be done with school and never wanting to leave school. Anyway, onto the project. These past 13 weeks have been hard. There were so many days where I just wanted to give up on the project. I think a lot of other writers my age make the excuse of "I'll write more when I'm out of school and have time to." I, myself, have been one of these people. You think that after you're done with school you'll have all the free time in the world to write, that you'll be able to focus on just writing and that it'll be your job. This summer certainly shattered that image for me. This summer I've been free of a job and still sometimes I dragged my feet to write. That isn't to say that I don't love writing and that I don't want this to be my life, but it is hard. You can always find excuses not to write, find ways that life is "too busy" for a page or even a paragraph of a story, or that you "have no muse." What I learned from this project is not that you can find your muse if you look hard enough, it's that if you don't have muse you still have to write. You force it out and if it doesn't work, then you'll fix it later. Being a writer isn't just sitting down whenever inspiration comes to you. It's sitting down at some point in the day because writing everyday is part of that job--regardless of what inspiration you have. Being a writer is getting ideas while you're half a asleep and having to write them down because if you don't, you won't remember them. Being a writer is navigating through the landmines that are cliches and abstractness. Being a writer means if you don't do it, no one else will. It is a beautiful, difficult job. But we love it, somehow.

That's all I can think to say in response to what I learned over these past 13 weeks, there's so much to shift through that I know I'm missing some important lessons I've learn. It'll come back to me in parts, I'm sure. A few little notes to myself that are a little more concrete than what I've said above: revision is the most important thing, second only to actually getting something written down in the first place. You need to figure out how to be funny in writing, because you're just not cutting it. Form poetry is not the enemy, don't avoid it. Watch out for cliches. Expand your vocabulary and find new ways to describe the picture in your head. Read more novels, this is never, ever going to hinder your writing. Don't let the job consume you, still find outlets for fun writing, otherwise you'll grow to resent it.

Thanks so much to everyone out there who has supported me through the process--especially my family, who grew tired of hearing me talk about it. No one is who they are by accident and no one is who they are without each influence they've encountered.

#reflection