Strikers
Goals are a bit of an anomaly for me. On one hand, the first thought that comes to mind is that there aren’t enough of them in my life. This is largely due to the fact that my beloved Arsenal, year-in and year-out, ends up breaking down about halfway through the season and ending up sitting somewhere in the Top 4 on the Premier League table…somewhere that is decidedly not first, all due to their ability to muck-up prime goalscoring opportunities even with so many great attacking strikers. On the writing side of things, however, I do have some goals in place that I am in the act of pursuing to balance out the deficit that those footballers leave me. These goals are far less defined than a soccer goal, and not as immediately satisfying, but they are certainly there and far more important.
My greatest goal in terms of my literary life is to be a novelist. While poetry is my first love, it is the novel that has held my attention for the longest. When I consider the most influential works to my writing style as well as my outlook on life, works such as Ulysses by James Joyce and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov stand out more so than a Neruda poem or a Shakespearean sonnet. I have often dreamed about writing a novel. I have sketched characters in mental graphite, erased and redrawn their defining characteristics. I have mapped out plots that would baffle cartographers. But every time I have sat down to begin, it seems as if all of my ambition fades as the page glares ever brighter before me, empty. I think that this will fade (a bit) if I structure my writing time a bit more.
As of right now, writing has lost much of its place in my schedule. With the end of my senior year and all the obligations that brings with it I have let my love slip a bit. One of my goals in conjunction with writing a novel is to schedule time to write into my schedule before I let myself get so busy that everything I enjoy and want to do is consumed by outside obligations. Writing not only is something I love (even with the frustration of writer’s block) — it’s also something that rejuvenates me. When I am stressed or in a bout of depression, writing allows me not only an escape but an outlet through which I can channel the negative into a positive. Scheduling writing time (even for just 15 minutes here and there) will do wonders for my mental health as I transition out of college and into the ever-approaching “real world”.
Furthermore, I want to get more poetry and short fiction published in the meantime. I have a few poetry credit, but I want to expand upon this as well as to get some of my fiction out there. I have begun submitting to some journals as I have a stock of stories sitting in my google drive. I want to continue generating new content, though. There are so many stories swirling around in my head that often enough it is hard choosing which to focus on at a single time. I want to push myself to write more completed stories, no matter their quality. Yes, first drafts will generally be pretty bad — but if I can push through that, and churn them out through practice, I know I will improve and over time both my output and my quality will increase dramatically.
Finally, I simply want to write more. I have touched on this in my last two paragraphs but in the end I became a writer not for accolades, but because I love it. I became a writer for the soft sound of a slowly-swooning soul amidst the falling universe snow, for the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane, for the great floodgates of the wonderworld swinging open. These images have shaped the way I see language and the way I think about the world. I see differently than before I became a reader, a writer. I see beauty in the mundane and words in the motion of the stars and wind and other people, and in this I find much of my meaning. To drop the high-poetics here, writing has given me a new way to see life. This is why I became a writer, and my utmost goal is to continue to create in hopes of never losing that vision and possibly helping others to see the same way. Five years from now, I might have written that novel. I might have more poetry published, or maybe even some essays. I am planning on being in graduate school pursuing my PhD in English literature at that time, but we all know how unpredictable life is. One thing I am certain of, however, is that I will still be a writer. I will still be building images from words and giving my world a home on the page, my own literary version of a striker.
Unlike Arsenal, I plan to deliver.
