Starving
By: T-Wolf (he/him/his, she/her/hers)
Editorial Team Member
If you want something done, do it yourself. That’s a motto I’ve known by heart for years now, ever since I decided I wanted to pursue my passion of writing for my life. But thinking up worldbuilding concepts, characters to create, and intriguing plotlines were never the difficult parts of creation. It was always the execution, the motivation to place pen to paper and fingers to keyboards, that brought hesitation to my mind. As it does for many aspiring story writers.
The delight of thought, of internal creation and rumination, has always come so easily for me. Even when the day is done and I lay in bed, waiting for sleep to call me, I entertain and tire myself- or avoid tiring myself- with scenes and scenarios from dozens of story universes I have in my brain. Sitting in the passenger’s seat of a car ride, staring in disinterest at another ten minutes of traffic, yields the same. I remember a moment in high school where a teacher asked the class how much pay we’d be willing to take in exchange for an exact hour of our time, while doing absolutely nothing- our minimum hourly wage. Yet I only felt a little embarrassed to think that I’d hardly need any pay at all. Really, time to have absolutely nothing but my head and my thoughts would be a relief to me, more than anything.
However, the act of doing is an entirely different beast, especially when it comes to creative work. I’m hardly alone in preferring thinking over doing, either. I’ve seen many tumblr posts and tiktok videos from fellow writers who have bemoaned the agony of thinking up entire scenes and characters, while struggling to place any of it on the page. If thought was all it took to put a story together, everyone would be doing it. And frankly, everyone would be doing it quite poorly too.
Still, there are days where I wish my motto could feel as strong as it used to. As infuriating as it is, sometimes all it takes to write a story is to, well, write it. There’s no shortcut around that. But writing felt easier when I was enough of an audience for myself. Writing felt easier when I didn’t seek to make it not just good, but even better than previous attempts. Writing felt easier when I wasn’t questioning whether I was still having fun or not- I just was.
I can still find moments of self-centered glee and thrill whilst writing. There are sentences and phrases and scene ideas that make me glow with a happiness far beyond mere pride, both when I first make them and when I look back on them years afterwards. Yet it’s strained by an internal desperation that no motto can will away. Above all else, the fate I fear is stagnation. To not keep improving, to not stay on top of my own ever-shifting expectations, is my death sentence. The bane of my creation is a distortion of my own skin- stuffed to the brim with glorious successes and humiliating failures, while devoid of any human mediocrity.
It’s the boredom, the in-between frustration, the inability to keep going or give up that keeps me human. But for so long, I’ve operated on the belief that I can be every exception to the rules that I want to be. I seek to create from love, but there are days often that I create from fear. Fear that the moment I stop creating, I cease to exist. And yet that fear itself keeps my most passionate ideas tucked away, never to make it on the page at all.
There’s no neat, bow-tied conclusion I have to offer here. Tomorrow, I’ll wake with the same ache for improvement that no idea can satisfy. It’ll be like that for the next week, the next month, most likely the next year- and then some. My creative work is most affected by this, but it plagues everything I do, small or large. A motto is not the treatment- in my case, perhaps it’s only a symptom. There is no amount of thinking nor doing that can vanish it in an instant. And as much as I want to unlearn this craving for more, as much as I want to rid myself of this distorted second skin- it has stuck for so long. Peeling it off brings a hurt of its own.
Most days, all I want are my younger days of writing. When thinking and doing felt like one and the same. When my fears were silent enough to know I was having fun.