You sit down to write, your hands hovering over your keyboard. The day’s events tumble around in your head – issues and responsibilities that demand attention. A small voice tries to push its way through. You close your eyes to try hear it, to try grab it, and ride it through the maelstrom.
There it is: the line.
You open your eyes and begin to type. The narrative grows louder, silencing the fracas. Words race across the screen. The page fills. If you had to stop to question where this was coming from, if you tried to slow it down so you could watch the process in action, it would surely unravel and splatter into a mess from which all your conscious chatter would resound.
But now it’s just you and the writing, you and the writing, you and the writing, until the process becomes meditative. Nothing else exists now. The people around you grow disembodied. The world around you dissipates. The demands of your life are no more. You are a solitary focus that has but one purpose: because YOU, and ONLY YOU, can deliver this message – be it a story, a poem, nonfiction, or whatever it is you’re working on.
Seven-point-six billion people occupy this world, but you are unique. You could search the world and you would never find your double – even identical twins think differently. There was nobody like you before you were born, and there’ll never be anybody like you after you’re gone. YOU are YOU, and in everything you do you do it your own way. Even in jobs that require conformity, even in tasks that are routine, you bring your own influence to bear – you may not realise it, but you do, and that’s what makes you special.
Writing is your chance to be distinct. More than a chance, it is YOUR calling. You can be that single beautiful voice heard in the clamour. You can be the siren who lures in readers – not to their doom, but to their enrichment. It is your chance to impart that something only YOU can. It is your chance to touch somebody else, and give them something that they will forever carry with them, and which they may pass on to future generations. It is your chance to be immortal.
So what is paramount is that you are true to yourself. Forget that story you love so much, that you wish you wrote. Forget that author who you love. Carry these things with you. Learn from them. Let them become A PART OF you. But do not ever let them override you. Do not ever aspire to emulate them, or to regurgitate them. These are the voices of others. They are there to be heard in their purest, original form, rather than be recyclced.
Go deep, deep, deep down, down below consciousness, through the filters of your life, past those inhibitions that sometimes have you worrying what others will think about you because of what you’ve written, go into that VOICE that is YOURS, and embrace it, harness it, and bellow it unchecked into your writing.
Write what only YOU can write.
Be YOU.