Why writing is important

21 April, 2024

Second to the struggle finding time to write, is the struggle of getting to write. Entering your zone, so to speak. It’s that feeling of watching the little black line blink in and out on your word processor, or sketching spirals in the margins of a notebook, or whatever people idly do at typewriters and nothing is coming to mind. (Sidenote: it’s a writers dream of mine to own an old fashioned typewriter someday. They’re simply too romantic not to want one.)  

Through college I depended on pure, raw inspiration. I would sit down at my computer and wait until an idea manifested itself, like Athena springing from Zeus’s forehead.  Then I would write, edit, and rewrite until the second the project was due. I think I managed twice in all four years, to submit a project before its deadline. 

This technique served me passingly. I was a B+ student in any class I was interested in. Once I was out of school, however, the well dried up. I haven’t been able to tap back into that space that let me write six stories, a research paper, and multiple essays in five months. That’s not to say that everything I wrote was good, but it was, at the end of the day, product: writing I had made. 

I’m reminded of the John Milton quote, “I need to be milked.” Something he said when he needed to write. I have, until recently, felt like that. I’m a cow that needs to be milked, but I have no idea how. I can feel the weight of thoughts and emotions churning in my head. The second I sit down though; they vanish into an inscrutable ball of chaos. Vague thoughts and ideas. A blank, white page. What’s the point of angry prose if the reader doesn’t know what to be angry at. 

That’s where my recent addition to my writing process has developed from. An intense need to be milked. The piece below titled, Ode to an HCA, is something I wrote briefly at the beginning of a writing session. I’m not particularly proud of it, but it was the only thing that was coming to mind. It was the only thing I could write. I had to write it. 

Once I did, the floodgates opened. The milk flowed, so to speak. I was able to write for nearly four hours on my current project, all because I wrote this prose poem (I think it’s a prose poem). That’s not to say this works anytime I’m experiencing writer’s block, but I am more consistently able to write as long as I start with the first thing that enters my head. 

Thank you for reading this far, whoever you are, and bearing through my milk jokes. I hope you enjoyed and that you’ll come back for more Irregularly Regular. 

Ode to an HCA