Writing comes from a very deep place.
By: Ronn Hanley
Tags: Writing Life, Personal Story, Memories, Compulsion To Write, Writing

Photo by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash

There are times when I feel that my older ‘self’ was much more aware than my ‘self’ of today…

I never used to examine why I feel compelled to write.

I just did it.

All through grade school, high school, the Army and in my life post Army.

In 2012 I fell off the wagon and spent 5 years barely writing anything. There are half a dozen reasons why I stopped but that’s a story for another day. Just know that every day during those years I treated myself to some of the most negative and bullying self-talk a person can endure. I could safely say that every day I wasn’t writing I had a bit of hatred for myself.

Eventually I came to my senses and began writing again.

When I made the decision I was determined to do things differently. I realized that if I didn’t try to understand the compulsion (and even control it to some extent) I would eventually stop again. This time permanently.

Guru’s tell us that knowing our WHY will help us succeed. I never knew why I had to write. It happened automatically and why didn’t matter.

Before I get started let me say this much — I don’t exactly know what writing is.

Yes, I know it means putting words down on a medium that other people can read. But in my mind I’ve never thought beyond using it to give out information, explore my personal world or try to tell a story.

Writing means different things to different people. At one point it was a coping method for me. For you it might be something different.

Knowing why has become important because as I’ve gotten older I realized that I don’t write the same way, or for the same reasons. My methods and process have altered with my new mental status.

My verbiage, intonation, tone, voice and vocabulary changed radically due to the influence of multiple sources (other writers, writing groups, instructors, non-writing friends and that one time I had a mentor for 15 minutes) and partly because my vocabulary has matured. I was the kind of nerd who read the dictionary for fun.

That’s why I say I don’t know what writing is anymore. With this many sources and influences I feel like I know less about the craft now than I did then. It used to be all instinct and young energy, now it’s more deliberate.

Now that I think about it, that deliberate nature might be why I stopped writing in the first place. It was less fun and spontaneous. It became work instead of exploration which destroyed the essential uniqueness.

I reasoned that taking a few classes, or finding a writing group — not so much to formalize my practice but to get me around people who still had that joy — might help me sort things out.

To the degree that my experiment succeeded I found a few answers about what writing is and why I write. I’m sharing here with the hope that my discoveries might help you.

Here’s what I found.

ANSWER 1 — WRITING IS ABOUT CONNECTING TO THE DEEP PLACES

It took me years to realize there are two types of writing — Surface and Deep.

Surface is the banal stuff you do at work — emails, spreadsheets, reports, etc.

Deep is what you’re doing when you make a personal journal entry, craft a heartfelt post on your blog, write a letter to someone you love or write fiction.

As a child I wrote stories to help me understand my day to day life. My childhood wasn’t ‘bad’ in the traditional sense but there were a lot of stereotypical things that went on that made no sense to me. When I got confused about something I would write it down and use a story to help me figure out the event and my feelings.

Everything I wrote from 9 to probably 17 was about coping with the world around me. A lot of it boiled down to a desperate need to feel accepted.

At that age it made sense to focus on the external. I could see it and experience it first-hand. I wrote what I saw and built a story around it to help figure out why people did what they did. This was years before I was fully ‘aware’ of myself and the fact that I was dealing with depression. A term I never officially heard until I was 15.

Connecting to strangers can be difficult and downright dangerous. We lived in the projects with some pretty ruthless characters. My introduction to one new boy was a punch to the face.

I never was part of the crowd. Millions of pre-teens experience this. The only thing ‘special’ about me was writing. I thought telling a cool stories would help me fit in.

If you don’t know, people living in situations like that (hood, broke, no dad, dealers on every corner, moms with a half dozen small children, no job) only traffic in the real. Their daily experience is harsh. My stories frequently fell on deaf ears (on the good side) or nearly got my ass whipped (on the bad). For years I had the reputation of being a ‘liar’ because I made up stuff instead of always telling the ‘truth’.

Still, I persisted because writing helped make the world a little less scary. I could do whatever I wanted in a story and the words ordered my chaos.

I was driven to understand my world using the written word.

ANSWER 2 — WRITING IS A NATURAL OUTGROWTH OF LOVE

I speak fluent Monster and Science Fiction Movie.

I couldn’t wait for Soul Train to be over on Saturday morning so the creature features could start. Chiller Theater’s title sequence used to scare the bejesus out of me.

I went to the dollar theater every chance I got to see the latest rubber monster fracas and loved anything by the Shaw Brothers.

Add in a healthy dose of Old Time Radio serials and it’s easy to see that I was doomed from the get-go.

I was in love you see.

Deeply in love with what I was seeing and hearing. I was transported each time a title card would display on the screen or a 50 foot spider walked silently up behind its unsuspecting victim. And don’t get me started on Godzilla…

Seeing things on the screen or hearing them on the radio generated an automatic response in my mind to begin re-writing. I could sometimes see where things might have been clearer or even cooler. My imagination lit up like a nuclear Christmas tree and it was a blast.

I tried to write what I was seeing in my head after watching a movie or hearing a radio story.

The other part of that equation was that I genuinely loved people. I’ve always felt that we’re better as a unit than we are as bickering individuals and I’m also a bit naïve (or at least I used to be).

That lead me to want to share the stories I was writing. As I said before I felt like acceptance was just around the corner if I told the right story to the right crowd and the right time.

ANSWER 3 — WRITING IS FOCUSED ENERGY AND THOUGHT

Many people tend to drift through the day only semi-patient while waiting for it to be over. Many of us focus on getting ready for the weekend starting on Monday morning.

I’m guilt of this. Unfortunately it’s super easy to sleepwalk through an entire life this way.

Writing forces focus on the writer and the reader. I honestly think this is why people who love to read seem to go further in life than those who shun books.

So long as the writing isn’t boring people will willingly go along for the ride. Do it well enough and they’ll repay you with money and hours of their lives.

My experience has taught me being awake and aware is imperative to good writing.

How do you get focus?

It’s simple really — You have to interact with real live people. You have to take what you learn about them (and through the interaction learn about yourself) back to the written page and do your best to make it live.

Stories and articles are about and for people. I suggest that you learn people. Focus on what makes them tick. Learn how we manipulate each other and love each other. Bring that out with your words and you’ll have a major part of the formula.

It’s like in business. People don’t buy from companies, they buy from other people. The stories, articles, and blog posts we produce MUST be about people and the way they interact with each other or their environment.

My early stuff came from the struggle to cope with event or incident. Someone had done something and I needed to understand and deal with it.

As I got older I began to write in a way that was less instinctive because I was learning ‘the rules’.

I worry that English classes and even creative writing courses sometimes damage creative minds by forcing them to rely on rote patterns. It definitely did a number on me.

I no longer needed focus so long as I followed the rules.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am a strong proponent of the 3 act structure. It’s imperative to understand story structure if you want others to be able to follow you.

My problem lies with forcing a young and adapting mind to a set pattern before it’s formed its own voice. I truly believe that’s the reason you see thousands of articles and videos that have to explain to a writer how to find their own voice.

Children do this kind of creative thinking naturally. Something in the process of education takes it away as we mature. Later on, when you remember that you have a creative soul, you end up having to be taught all over again how to re-capture your unique voice.

When you sit down to write remember your best weapon is your mind. Bring everything you have to everything you do and you’ll succeed. Never half-ass it.

Honestly, even if you don’t succeed with millions of book sales, being able to say that you were truly focused on producing your best work that’s a major win for you.

ANSWER 4 — WRITING IS FREAKING HARD

And in other news, water is wet…

Hear me out.

Getting ideas for stories is stupid simple. I’ve had 6 ideas in the last 40 seconds. Most of them are crap. Would they produce a decent book or article? Who knows? Maybe, maybe not.

It’s easy to plan out a story or get some idea of how it should go, but the act of sitting down in a chair and not getting back up until you have words on the page is HARD.

I said before that it takes a strong understanding of human nature to tell a great story. Someone who was really good at that was the recently passed Toni Morrison.

She understood black women very well. Her stories didn’t read like simpleminded tales. There was a depth and pain there that not many of us can produce.

That’s the kind of hard I’m talking about.

Never mistake writing schlock for writing stuff that moves you.

Something I’ve noticed since joining Medium is the people who get into their deepest feelings are the ones who seem to enjoy wide readership.

If you can’t make yourself laugh, or feel the pain and wonder or, even better, bring yourself to tears with what you’re doing how do you expect anyone else feel those sensations?

We’re all thinking, feeling extremely social beings despite what the news would have you believe.

We rely on each other even if we act like we don’t. The words we write reach out and you never know who you’re going to touch, entertain, or help.

Never treat your words lightly. Writing is hard because it MUST be. Words carry weight and the impact can be devastating in the wrong hands.

Those of us who do this owe it to anyone who might read to do the hard part up front.

FINALLY

Anyway, that’s some of what I’ve learned over the last two years. I finally understand that the more I learn, the less I seem to know. It’s my compulsion to write that drives me to put words down and continue to learn how to do it better — an endless Mobius loop.

I hope that some of what I’ve said resonates. It took me a long time to write this article and it went through about 4 drafts. Even now I feel it could benefit from more polishing. That’s what I meant by hard. The work never seems finished.

I could sit and do this for another week trying to make it perfect but at the end of the day it’s time to let it fly and see how it does on its own.

Peace!

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