How I grew more comfortable with my writing style.
Over the years, my writing style is something that I have struggled with, the most. I started writing in the 8th or 9th grade, mostly in a narrative style that was usually easy to understand. Most of my characters would be simple, and inspired by real life instances that people in my class, and even teachers enjoyed reading.
However, as I advanced with life and finding inspirations within more abstract, philosophical and poetic concepts, my writing emerged to be more descriptive, a lot more cryptic than one would expect, with hidden meanings that usually only the people close to me, would be able to decipher and the rest would be up to their interpretation.
It started when I was gifted with The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Without giving much of the spoilers away, the book can be summarised as a story narrated by “Death,” following the life of a young Liesel Meminger — and ends with Death questioning humans and trying to understand them, like any other person would. This thrilled a spark of creativity within me, and I began to adapt more figures of speech each time I wrote a piece, including an avid amount of metaphors and personification.
The reason why I truly struggled was when I started comparing my own way of expression to other people’s way of expression. I envied how well decorated their words would be and I ached to be able to express myself in the same way, so much so that I even began to mimic some of these writers with the hopes that it would someday come to me naturally. (Well, that never happened and I continued to struggle for several months, thinking I had a writer’s block or something). Turns out, I was blocking out what came to me naturally, and trying to adapt to styles that required purposeful thought. Not saying that writing with purposeful thought is a bad thing, but for me, it limits my imagination and creates these invisible boundaries that I could never see myself crossing.
The reason why progressively started writing more naturally, was when I embraced my true purpose of writing. I realised that I never wrote to please anyone, and that I had always written for myself. Writing had always been something that allowed me to process the intricacies of my emotions and the natural flows of everything that would be arising in my imagination. Whether it was being inspired from a song, a poem or something I watched during the day, I was always quick to pick up a pencil and write my heart away, rather than sitting and thinking about how I could make it sound pretty or how I could add mind blowing descriptions that would make people want to pick up a dictionary.
My primary purpose has always been, to express. If I can’t express, I can’t write. The reality is, every individual has their own ways of expression — whether it be writing within itself, or other means such as drawing, sketching, speaking, communicating, dancing, singing. Anything that allows us to communicate our emotions a little bit better is a form of expression and writing has always allowed me to do that, since I’m not the best speaker or verbal communicator.
I understand that a lot of writers face this issue, and not just writers. In any other form of art or profession, it is easy to feel like you are less than someone and question your own skill. In that case, it is merely essential to look within and ask:
Why did I actually start doing this?
What was the purpose of indulging into this in the first place?
Once you begin tracing back your steps, you’ll realise why you started and the reason you used to enjoy it so much, and you can slowly begin to adapt to the same ways and in the end, become more comfortable with yourself within that particular realm.
Until then!
