Here lies the irony

Upon reviewing my old blog (the one filled with all the post-college emo-laden entries), I realized that a spark had died. That spark that could make me get up in the middle of the night to sleepily pen a poem, or lose myself in thought as while writing another short story. It has been ages since I felt that spark, the one that made me sure that, indeed, I was meant to wield a pen and be a writer.

I don't know if that spark really just dies out once you begin to write for a living. As you find yourself creating charts to keep track of what needs to be written and by when, you wonder how you factor in being hit by inspiration. Is it something you can even schedule? Being a writer by profession has forced me to be able to just write, whether I feel like it or not.

Many say that real writers don't wait for inspiration; they just write, period. While I agree, I worry that writing for a living has caused me to come up with coping mechanisms that my idealistic fresh-out-of-college self would disagree with. Reading an article, copying the quotes I'd like to use, then stringing them together into a coherent piece was not the way I envisioned my writing to be. I always took pride in coming up with something out of nothing, in having a blank sheet as my canvas, pinning thoughts unto paper as fast as my hands would permit. I never wanted to have a template for my writing, but upon discovering that --without conscious effort-- I could write press releases that fit exactly one page, I realized that a template is exactly what I have hardwired into my system.

Maybe the existence of such a template has made it difficult for me to spontaneously come up with a blog entry that's coherent and substantial. After churning out press release after press release, there's hardly any time to stop and think about something that really matters to me enough to write about it. Trying to sit in front of my blog to write about my thoughts is an exercise in futility-- anything that comes out of me feels forced, and I am forced to just delete everything and forego writing an entry. How ironic, to be a writer who cannot even write about things that truly mean something to me, things that I actually care about.

Yet, such is life. This is the profession I chose, and this is the talent I was gifted with. Template or no template, I was meant to write. So all I can do today is hope that the spark returns someday, to remind me what it feels like to fall in love with writing all over again.