I make my way on the orange line to the State Street train station in hopes of heading to my sacred writing space. I enter the quiet room and I immerse myself into my work in hopes of getting further along in my writing project. It sounds like the perfect set up yet when the moment arrives I find myself stopped. For awhile I thought I was experiencing writer’s block, but it hasn’t been about a lack of things to write, I’ve been trying to determine the right thing to write. Many people would call this “THE CRITIC.” The inner voice that yells “your writing is terrible” before you even get the words out. The internal editor that stops you before you even utter a word. The small voice encouraging you to put off writing until a “genius” or “beautiful” passage is created.
This constant state of paralysis while writing has made me think of my childhood. I used to read free books that my family got from shelters and donation bins. We were living beneath the poverty line so, interestingly enough, I found myself with a ton of classics portraying worlds incredibly far from my own. I was reading “David Copperfield” or “Little Women” and falling in love with books more and more each day. I was so in love with them I tried to make my own. I wrote without worry about whether my plot made sense, or if my characters were developed, or if my line breaks were in the right spot. Somehow as I got more information about literature and the world of writing, my ability to be free while writing dwindled away.
One of the reasons I’ve always loved creating, whether it was a book, a dance or my own theater play with my siblings as actors, was because it was free. And not free in the commercial sense of the word, free in the sense that what I created was mine. It wasn’t under the influence of my future inner critic, the world of publishing or a commissioner. I could create to express, explore and connect.
It’s probably impossible for me to recreate the type of freedom I had as a child, yet I am challenging myself to write whatever is in my head. I am challenging myself to let my thoughts avalanche onto a page and make absolutely no sense. I am abandoning the “project” or the “mission.” I am challenging myself to fall in love with the joy of creating something. I am allowing myself to revel in that space, if only for a moment. Until my inner critic learns what’s going on and tells me to stop, so I can start the process all over again.
-Tatiana M.R. Johnson, 2018 WROB Gish Jen Fellow
