Amen, sister

An ode to the "Amen," the "I agree," the "Yes!", the "Are you inside my head, reading my journals, listening in on my prayers?"...

This from Nikki, the publisher of skirt! magazine, about writing:

"Crafting daily short blurbs relieved enough creative pressure to keep me from building up a head of steam to go deeper in my own writing. I love any excuse possible to avoid the hard work of writing, rewriting, editing, deleting, and starting over, but I want to flex those muscles again. I want to draw more, take more pictures, notice more. That's why I keep coming back to this blog; it's my laboratory, my writer's workshop, my journal of possibilities. Maybe I'll find out that I'm destined to be a writer of paragraphs, not pages, but there's also a chance I'll string those paragraphs into pages someday and pages into chapters. I don't think it will matter to the world whether I Twitter or tell some stories, but it makes a world of difference to me."

In just a few short months, I've allowed my writing to become my JOB, instead of my release. I think that's why I turn here to unfold. I've got a 150 word article to write today. But, instead, I'm here... letting my thoughts and words tumble out of my fingertips and onto this unlimited piece of cyber-paper, trying my very best not to self-edit every sentence. When I'm frustrated by the required brevity of my assignments at work, I find myself wishing that I remembered how to write stream-of-consciously, to write the way I did in my creative writing class as I walked down Italian streets, smelling, tasting, touching and translating my senses into words...when I had dreams of writing the next Great American Novel. I realize that I'm horribly out of practice. This is my plight, but not mine alone.