On Writing

In writing, everything resonates. This is one of things I have learned in my four years as a Creative Writing student. A part of me knew that intense emotions fuels the fire of literary passion, that the excess of love, hope, pain, fear finds its way into the words that seemingly bleed from a metaphorical wound slashed across the writer's wrist. I was young then. That is how I wrote before.

Now, I am slowly re-learning how to write again: more care, more distance, more craft. What seemed to flow so naturally before is now a painful process of writing and re-writing. We are never truly satisfied with our art, I've learned, and so now I must be wary of being complacent in what I say, always examining the minutest of details in an effort to fit within the grand scheme of things. This is one of the things I am now struggling with - writing outside the academe, finding a place for an art amidst the chaos of building a career, a life within and yet outside writing. What a paradox, if you think about it.

Another struggle for me is a deviation from genre. I began writing poetry, and ultimately achieved a goal of sorts - publishing a collection of poems, with thanks from a grant from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. Poetry has always been my comfort zone, my playground, my four-cornered nook. Everything was familiar then - the air, the metaphors, the language of the unsaid.

But now, I find myself deviating from the path of least resistance, focusing instead on the prose, the fiction of a life, creating worlds out of nothing and pretending that it is something. The difficulty here is wondering where to place myself. Who am I and what do I write. The constant pursuit of identity, of naming something, of defining the unknown, is always a struggle for me. Once I am comfortable within a structure, I find myself wanting to escape the walls of my own making.