The Itch to Write

I find myself inevitably facing the itch to write. And yet I often find myself, equally inevitably, facing another problem: not being able to start. Needing the ‘perfect setting’ to write and not being willing to take the time and set aside a moment for myself to put my thoughts into words. It’s a problem I face with many things, though I’ve fortunately been slowly easing myself out of these habits for things like studying and exercise.

Nevertheless, I find myself thinking up short stories or poems as I’m going about my day. My notes, both physical and online, are absolutely bursting with ideas that I’ve jotted down on the bus or as I was walking somewhere or as I was falling asleep. So the next stage is going through with them. And that is where the true challenge lies. It’s one thing to write down a rough idea in a rough format without adding any substance to it. It’s an entirely different beast altogether to bring that idea to life, however meekly.

Therein lies the challenge. Bring the myriad ideas bouncing around my head and clogging up my notepads to life. And that is something that I have to face within myself. Being able to put down incomplete ideas. Putting things out there that won’t get my stamp of approval if I really thought about it and looked at it through a critical lens. Because more often than not—most often, even—we are our own worst enemies and harshest critics. Perfectionism sometimes brings me to challenge myself to heights that I otherwise would find unattainable, and yet, it also becomes the shackles keeping myself from producing the volume and output necessary to grow at a regular speed.

This applies to many different media; be it text or audio or visual. I often find myself imagining the ideal scenario where I have hours and days and weeks to create something perfect, that matches up with my expectations exactly. But, of course, that’s not the way things go. You have to compromise to create. Compromise as you lose a lot of the subtlety and nuance that you have in your head, heart, and soul as you’re putting pen to paper or thought to keyboard. It’s difficult to find this compromise and accept the fact that you’ll have to meet it halfway.

And then—the most surprising thing of all, that motivates me to write despite it all—people accept things that you may not. Receiving positive feedback. People telling you that they liked what you wrote and encouraging you to write more. Coming back to the thought that one is one’s own harshest critic, it truly does come back to that. In the same way that you may appreciate art the artist themselves rejects and finds an infinite number of faults in, people looking in from the outside will find so many more positives in anything that you put out than you would in your own work.

Of course, there will always be those who don’t like what you do. That’s inevitable. There’s a handful of billion of people out there. Those that figure among an audience or network will absolutely figure those who don’t enjoy your particular output. But that’s not the focus. There will be people who encourage you, push you forward, and motivate you to keep writing. To keep on typing. To keep on going and doing what you’re doing. But, even before those people, it’s important that you do it for yourself. Not to put things out there for people to see, but to put things out there for the sake of putting things out there. Outputting not for feedback, but for the sake of output itself.

I want to write more. To practice writing for the sake of writing. To put my thoughts to paper and pixels so that some internal part of me is satisfied with the fact that today, there was an output.

And, on a more practical note, I want to do so with all of my languages. Particularly Japanese. I need output practice in order to polish and sharpen my ability to express myself in the language. Of course, I’m not forgetting Russian or French. I’d love to set myself a goal to get some written output done; even if I don’t publish it as often or at all. Just to get my hands moving and my brain working and some sort of activity going in some sort of direction.

Besides the perfectionism, or perhaps because of it, I always take time redacting and going over everything that I write in all of my languages. Particularly Japanese though, the one that I acquired later in life and that I’m actively learning. Of course, we don’t want to make mistakes. I don’t want to make mistakes. I want it to be immediately perfect, clean, beautiful. But it won’t be. And until I force myself to write one thousand short stories or blog entries in the language, I won’t be making tangible progress.

So that’s just what I’ll do. I’ll write. And I won’t measure and judge and fear putting out things that are incomplete or junky or janky. Because we learn from our mistakes, and I have to be able to make them to start learning. I need to scratch that itch to write. I’ve found it often festering in my thoughts when I don’t allow them to seep out, even in a little way.

And so I will. I did today. What’s stopping me from doing more? We’ll have to wait and see.