An Expedition in Writing

Hello! I'm back again after over a year.

Without wasting much time, I'm getting right into this story and what it is all about.

When I was a child of about 9 years old, I really got into reading. This love was cultivated by my mother who bought me and my siblings the cutest story books and made reading enjoyable by introducing fun activities and using positive reinforcement. I soon discovered the absolute magic of  the written text and before long, I was reading everything in sight -yes, including my mother's diaries, much to her consternation!

As many a writer will bear witness, the love for reading eventually produced a reciprocal love for writing. It could not be helped! The books I had read had unlocked a vault within me and these words needed to be let out in my own literary voice. I remember finding a quiet nook within the bedrooms in my childhood home and writing as many stories, songs and poems as I could before the day grew long and I had to have supper with my family. When I was in secondary school, I was the go-to person for my peers on guidance for their essays. I loved the power of words!

And so it was and so it continued for years; I carried with me everywhere I went this special love and passion for writing which I treasured highly, and which I put to use at every opportunity. However, late into my teenagehood, I became conscious of other things - I got more social and came out of my proverbial shell to not only observe but engage with the world around me. I made friends, we hung out, I took long walks with friends, I sang in a choir, I had sleepovers. I was discovering a brand new me! It was heady stuff. However, my excitement was tinged with regret as I realised that all my other activities were filling up the time in which I would have previously been writing.

This elicited feelings of guilt, an the guiltier I felt, the more I stayed away from writing. After a while, writing became a chore to me. I, whose primary love and devotion was to pen and paper, now considered writing a task! The worse had happened and my belly was in constant knots over it. It did not, however, end there. Such was my passion fro writing that a simple decision to return to it would have set me on the right course toward recovering my passion. However, I dreaded the idea of writing mechanically and not out of the overflow of my heart like I had previously done. I feared that setting a writing goal to which I aspired daily would strip off whatever magic was left for me in writing and leave it a cold, technical, lifeless and loveless former-flame.

The unabridged version of this story goes on to tell how many times I tried, what tactics I employed, what feelings I endured, suppressed, denied, and to what end these endeavours led me. However, for the sake of keeping your attention, I will wrap up this version.

The purpose of taking this aptly-named writing expedition is to see what will emerge at the end of a few months if I commit to writing once a week. I hope you stick around with me on this journey, and even better, that you join me no matter where you stand in your writing journey.

Bon Chance!