On the Difficulty of Writing Without a Soul

“I think college teaches you techniques and skills, et cetera. And, uh, it teaches you something about the, the craft of writing, but art has to be alive, has to have life in it, and college does not teach you anything about that. It seems to me I have a poem and one line is, ‘This is a poem,’ uh, ‘This is about one human heart.’ And it seems to me that poetry, to live, has to come out of lived human hearts.”

-Lucille Clifton in “The Power of the Word, part 6”

When people see this site of mine, they often complement the writing. They tell me they enjoyed reading what I have written, and that I should write more, and have I considered being a writer? I always respond to this in the same way: I’ve considered it, but I don’t really have anything to say that I think people would pay to read. My cousin told me that I write very well, but there’s no passion in my writing. She’s right, there isn’t. There’s very little passion in me, and the writing reflects that. But like Lucille Clifton says, college doesn’t teach you anything about that.

I’m writing this at school, in the library, second floor. I’m in college. I’m taking English 1B. I want to improve my writing. A couple of years ago, I took a course on Professional Writing Skills. I got an A. But what do I do with that? What good are professional writing skills when there’s nothing I’m dying to say? Maybe I’m in the wrong place. I’m working on my the craft of writing, when I should be working on the life. “College does not teach you anything about that.” But where do I go to learn?

Well, I suppose maybe college *does* teach you something about that, after all. If it weren’t for my English class, I wouldn’t even be thinking about this right now. I wonder, though, if college can answer the question it exposed. If I want to be a writer, I have to have something to write about. How do I add vibrance to my life so that I’ll have something vibrant to write about?

On a side-note, I think that frequent sabbaticals from working life (say, one quarter of every year?) to take some classes would benefit me greatly. Keep me thinking, help to stave off mentropy, and get me some time away from The Machine. Or perhaps, if I strike it rich, I can get a summer home in the mountains and get away from it all for a while every year.

Maybe I should have gone away to college, seen other places, how people are somewhere else. I don’t know. Is it too late? Perhaps. Not in terms of logistics, but in terms of me.

I’m off to see about applying for a job as a time traveller.

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