Thanks to a spring cleaning kick I’ve been on the past month, I’ve done some digging, prioritizing, rearranging… and then some.
When I stumbled upon my stack of old writing notebooks, I couldn’t help but smile.
Just look at that handwriting?
Bear in mind, I was in the 9th grade at this time.
This got me thinking: What was it that drove me to fill notebooks upon notebooks with blue or black ink? What drove me to spend my free time in another world and then force my dear friends to read it?
Because I needed to. And I loved it.
In these busy days, it is easy to forget why we’re doing what we’re doing. So taking a moment to go back to what we love, remembering why we put ourselves through the late nights, early mornings, painstaking edits and endless rewrites, is sometimes exactly what we need.
For whatever passion drives you and eats up your spare time: What “started” it all for you?
I have a few legal pads full of scribbled novels from my teenage years. I think it was the desire to be understood, to create, and to express myself in new ways that drove me to write. I know photographers who share the way they view the world by taking pictures of the world, editing it to reflect the emotions they feel. For writers, we create the world. We get to orchestrate the emotions and circumstances in ways that we can’t in our personal lives.
But maybe that’s just me. 🙂