Free write

No, I did not choose this as a title because this week’s prompt was freestyle writing.

In 9th grade, my English teacher made us get a writing notebook. This notebook was not for notes or homeworks, but for us to just write.

Every single day at the start of class, he would write a prompt on the whiteboard, and he would tell us to get our notebooks out and respond to the prompt for the first five minutes of class. And what’s interesting was that he would say that there’s really nothing stopping us to write anything we want, and if we have anything we want to write about, we can discard the prompt and write to our hearts content.

Some days he would write only three words on the white board –– “prompt: free write.” And as the semester progresses, we had more free write days. I’d like to think it’s because he ran out of prompts. But even during those lazy days when he couldn’t think of a prompt, one thing was for sure, you can’t not write.

He even said writing “I don’t know what to write” for as many times as you can until the five minute timer rings was good enough to grant us full participation points. And he made sure we understood one thing: bad writing is better than no writing.

So I would start my English class everyday writing on my purple notebook. Some days I followed the prompt, but some days I just wanted to write to my heart’s content. It came to a point when I started writing a story. Every single day, one more page of the story unfolds. I thought if I write this story for five minutes every day, maybe once I have a whole school year’s worth of writing, I can turn this into a book.

But fourteen-year-old Steph had no idea she was going to one day try to pursue writing as a career. She wanted to be a lawyer. But she knew that she loved writing. And that even though it was only five minutes every day, she savored every second of it, just immersed in a sea of creativity. And at that moment, she knew exactly what she liked to write about.

Now I didn’t even remember what I was writing about five years ago. I just know that I miss that feeling. Somewhere between all the writing flag classes, the countless email writing, the published stories, I had lost touch of my creative side. I was a better writer than I was five years ago, that’s for sure. I could communicate thoughts way more effectively. But somewhere between trying to do a lot of different things at once, I realized, I had no idea what I love to write about. When I would be asked to introduce myself in a journalism class and the teacher asked me what topics I like to cover, I’d say that I don’t know.

So I tried hard to figure that out. I tried blogging. I wrote for publications. I tried to express myself through the stories I write for my classes and made sure I was truly passionate about what I’m writing about. But at the end of the day, all of that was work.

And there’s nothing wrong about that.

But what’s dangerous was that I had lost the ability to express myself in my writing. There’s always this pressure of making the next thing I write the best thing I’ve ever written. But that’s not always true. I admit throughout this year, between the 40 or so articles I’ve written, I was often disappointed at what I wrote. Every time I’m writing about something that I thought I was passionate about, my mind wanders and thinks about other cool things I could be writing about if I weren’t stuck writing about this boring topic.

But I never learn. The cycle repeats again and again and again of me feeling tired and thinking my writing sucks because I didn’t feel that rush that I felt in 9th grade –– when I had no pressure to be perfect. My notebook wasn’t going to be published somewhere. It was just me, my pen, and my purple notebook for five minutes every day.

Last week, I was having a devotional time and felt that God was asking me: “What do you want?” And after a couple minutes of thinking to myself about what I really want, I answered: “I want to write.”

Even after all of that, after the challenges I had to face as I pursue ways to write for a living, I still wanted to write. I still loved it so much.

But the next question was: “What do you want to write about?” And I couldn’t answer that because I’m still trying to figure that out, but I think I still got plenty of time.

In the mean time, I’ll continue writing but I could add in some free write days –– when I can just write for myself, without the fear of it not being the best thing I’ve written. And maybe once I have enough of those free write days, I’ll find one thing that sticks to me –– one that makes me want to write about more and maybe possibly one day write a book about.

But even if that happens, I’ll still never get enough of free write days.