For the next 20 days, WordPress will send me one writing prompt every day. Today’s writing prompt is…

I write because…

I can’t pinpoint one reason why I write. Growing up, writing was a chore. English was my least-favourite primary school class, with a teacher who I could only describe as a small, stout Severus Snape. I remember he gave us a map with stickers of witches, princesses, goblins, and all sorts of fantastical characters. We had to stick the characters on the map to visualise the story we’d write.

Of course, the excitable 10-year-old me proceeded to fill the map with every sticker I had. I only realised my mistake once home: I had to write a story out of this mess. I wrote a Pandora’s Box tale with an adventurer opening up a chest that contained all sorts of supernatural nasties, ending my suffering with a swift “To Be Continued”. I did not get a good mark.

At that age, I was enthralled with long-form storytelling. The Saga of Darren Shan and Anthony Horowitz’ Alex Rider series were cherished favourites of mine. When I was growing up, no matter where you stood in a bookshop, Harry Potter was easily spied.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this – I guess this is just some background context to what writing I was passionate about. Whether it be applicable to what I write next, I do not know.

I write much more now, and it is no longer the torture I perceived it to be – I have found passion. I write for WhatCulture about my favourite entertainment media. It may appear selfish knowing your passion somewhat stems from the joy of making your opinion heard, to stand on a soapbox as it were, but writing comes to me easier this way. I have too many times accepted assignments where the passion is absent and writing feels like wading through a foggy bog filled with traps of procrastinating quicksand and sludgy marshes.

To write is to express oneself. Even when I wrote the most formulaic news bulletins on my Journalism degree, broadcast to… well, no one was really watching a university’s spotty YouTube broadcasts. Still, I was proud my writing was good enough to be on a pedestal in the YouTube museum, even when no-one ever visited that particular wing.

Recently, most of my creative writing goes into YouTube scripts. I hope my VOs make people laugh, chortle, guffaw, chitter, or whatever weird wisp of air comes out of your mouth when you’re happy. Never be ashamed of your happiness.

I’m always worried with assignments like these whether I’m doing ‘the right thing’. After this, I will look at other people’s posts and probably witness the most fantastic prose and well-planned thoughts, and I will curl up into a ball and curse the day I ever picked up a pen to write because how could I be so arrogant as to think my writing could be as good as those godly paragraphs? We live in a never-ending sea of writing; the internet teems with content all vying for people’s attention. How can I compete?

The truth is, I can’t. Yet.

Because with every lexical choice and consideration of syntax, I get closer to being almost good; sort of alright.

When I used to write plays at university, I’d always listen to Ira Glass’ view on good taste before starting. I know I have good taste. I love the things I like and see such wonders in the smallest of sentences and quips of movie dialogue. But I just can’t quite conjure those images that make souls soar.

Yet.

I write to be at that level. I write, as Anne Lamott calls them, shitty first drafts so amongst the thousands of those roughs, I will find diamonds.

The truth is, however, I can write a lot more than I currently do. Sure, I write for WhatCulture; I write short weekly reviews on how my productivity is going; I write small scripts and messages to friends, but I can write more. And that’s why I’ve started this challenge, to rekindle my passion. I haven’t stopped writing in 18 minutes. I can feel the electricity in my fingers flitting across the keys. I need to awaken my writing passion, like reconnecting with a long-lost love. That fire, that urge, is where all those incredible, enchanting prose and secrets and images and hilarious lines dwell.

In essence, I write to keep the dust off the bookshelf, to keep the cold snuffing out the campfire in the middle of a dark wood, to jump-start that energy I had as a ten-year-old gleefully putting of sticker after sticker, story after story, on a never-ending roadmap of adventure.

(21 minutes)

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