Where we started from

I had a conversation with someone the other day about writing more. We talked about ways to trick yourself into writing, and the things that prevent us from writing. (Mine is that, there’s always something else I can/should be doing, and then complete laziness wins out. Mad Men won’t rewatch itself for the 4th time!) We also talked about insurmountable projects. Like, this crazy large idea for a story that I have, that I just can’t ever seem to work on because I have no idea where to start. And then this person said something that I always knew in my heart to be true and I don’t know why I had forgotten about it…"Write a poem." Write a poem. Poetry used to be my life. I loved poetry. I lived poetry. I was a poet. I performed it, I read it. I read a poem in a class once (not one of mine) and the professor liked the way I read it so much that he asked me to read it again. I was in the grocery store once and someone that I didn't recognize at all came up to me and said, “Hey you were the poetry girl, right?” Y’ALL I was the poetry girl in high school. (Also known as “white t-shirt girl”.) And what happened? I grew out of it? I started wanting to write more. I wanted to leave less to interpretation. There was a story I wanted to tell, a world I wanted to build, and I wanted to do that in a paragraph, dammit. I think there’s also a part of me that wanted to grow up. Poetry...I grew up with poetry. Poems were my writing training wheels. I wrote poetry as a self-centered teenager. It was how I processed the world, it was about me, for me. It was so indulgent, so myopic! That’s not what Real Adults ™ do. (Y’all I know this is not true. I read a ton of amazing poetry right now and I can’t even.) So I stopped writing poetry. And you know what I started writing? I can’t even pretend like I write fiction because I have never once finished a short story I started. (Not true, there was one, for a class.) I started writing BLOG POSTS. Jeez, self, if you thought poetry was indulgent, where do blog posts stand on that scale? Blog posts are the molten lava chocolate cake of self-indulgence. High school poetry is like, an ice cream sandwich. Anyways, so this person told me to write a poem. Because you only need to write a few lines. And then when you want to revisit it you just have to read a few lines, change a few words, and you can move on. I can do that. I can totally do that. 2014, more poems, less telling people about the novel that you want to write. Sound like a plan? Sounds like a plan. I'm going back to my roots. Back to where I started from. The irony, of course, that I wrote this all up as a blog post, instead of you know actually writing a poem, is not at all lost on me.