Write Deeply, Feel Greatly

Temiloluwa Johnson
3 min readMar 20, 2024

--

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. —William Wordsworth.

If there’s one question people have asked me more often than I can count, it is how I write the way I write. Although, I have tried to explain using the many analysis of my life that I’d done. However, I don’t think I’d ever been able to truly explain it until recently.

Photo by mohsen ameri on Unsplash

In this quarter, I have been in my feelings quite a lot and the last few days I have avoided certain apps and just had time to dig around in my head and to hear my thoughts and I finally uncovered the one thing I think differentiates my writing.

Writing deeply.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

When it comes to my writing, even the ones I do for commercial reason, I always dig deep into the deep recess of my soul and to write from that place that is raw and often times bleeding. Then, I edit with my head but that's not the point. We're on to writing. We'll handle editing later.

That meant that to write deeply, I had to feel greatly.

Photo by Cris Trung on Unsplash

I had to feel the many emotions that I would like to convey to my reader in many degrees and variations. While this might make my writing cool, it certainly wrecks havoc on my personal life.

It means I am a little sensitive than most. It means I'm prone to overthinking. It means I live in my head a lot. It means what might be a slight tremor to others is an earthquake to me. It means feeling a thousand and one things at once and constantly juggling the nagging feeling that I might be losing my mind.

Photo by Zoe Holling on Unsplash

I admit that I still haven't gotten the hang of how to have these feelings under control. Nevertheless, I give myself credit for learning how to function despite those feelings. Many times, I want to call in and say, "I'm sorry but I can't handle this task right now because I'm currently having an internal crisis and trying to sort through my feelings all at once."

I am learning to instead recognize that this feeling is important and a certain character of mine that I'm creating is going through such so, I am able to utilize those feelings to build character arcs or to sit down and download my heart in an article for you.

Photo by Sapan Patel on Unsplash

Still, I feel a tinge of shame for having to feel these things the way I do. From being sensitive and thus being termed, "emotional."

I don't have a moral lesson from this bit but I do know that to write those articles that makes people stop in their tracks or gives them a certain fuzziness in their belly, you have to feel the world in that manner and write from that place.

In other words, feel greatly, write deeply.

Photo by shahin khalaji on Unsplash

--

--

Temiloluwa Johnson

A creative free spirit with big writing dreams who spends way too much time creating mental pictures in her head. 🇳🇬