Writing Fingerprints

By: Harry Gittens, Lauren Hannough-Bergmans, Nelanthi Hewa

Hey everyone. I try to write. I really do. I sit down at my laptop and try to pour words on to the screen and add on to them to make sentences. Sometimes I dance my fingers around the keyboard [(whose layout I’m so familiar with) you know like when you use the same one every single day and get vexed by all others when you try to use them] in cartoonish and exaggerated ways trying to convince myself I know what I’m saying. Sometimes it helps and I feel accomplished, it doesn’t always though. When it doesn’t work and I really have no fuckin’ clue about what I’m to say I generally follow this procedure.

Whining. Whining is great. Whining makes me feel like I actually have problems. And don’t get me wrong, it is a problem when you can’t think of anything to write. When I need to write something: a song, a poem, or something like an essay, I sit staring at my computer and flip back and forth from the blank word document (of course with my name and other required info in the top left corner, there to make me feel like I have done something, dealt with the required formatting and such) and webpages. After procrastinating a bit I spew a terrible and poorly constructed sentence onto the virtual paper. I realize can’t do this on my own so I harass those who are closest to me. I whine to anyone who fits into this category of people for about an hour while procrastinating by surfing the web.

That is what I am doing right now actually. Not the whining but procrastinating. This is my second night writing this and I don’t know from where my thought train left off yesterday.

Admitting that got me back on track.

Usually after whining for a while, the “closest to me” individual that I decided to talk to about this assures me that I can indeed do this because I am decent enough at writing. I’ll take the encouragement while giving many thanks and sit on that for a while. I usually wait a while and then spit out a random sentence in my head that is intriguing and has potential to build on. I then work on that. Yes I do.

That initial sentence is what is able to get me started on my project. I like to make them short and gradually build up size from there, adding more and more elements.

For me, writing has never been difficult. I am a follower of Hemingway’s “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed,” school of thought. By choosing to write, most of the difficulty has already been taken care of. Despite this, I acknowledge that it is not always easy to discover that magical thought that allows you to produce something that you itch to show everyone you know, in the “Look at me mommy” fashion. However, this does not mean that there is no formula to writing- quite the opposite in fact, as nine times out of ten I find myself following a few steps to get the creative ball rolling. I’ll try my best to curtail the unnecessarily preachy how-to book approach to this by referring merely to my own work as opposed to the typical you may follow this when attempting to write, format. Without fail my first step is to create a playlist. This is no random combination of songs, no shuffle permitted here. The songs must be worthy of either the idea I have chosen to discuss, or the character I am trying to create. There is a time and a place for both The Smiths and Beirut, but they need to be carefully separated based on the intended point of the piece. At this point it is not essential to have a fully formed idea; the music is the vein of inspiration, waiting to be tapped. I am continually influenced by what I listen to, adopting a softer tone with classical music or an abrasive one with hip hop. A couple sentences will come to mind; words jump out and demand to be thrown into context. Once an idea has been happened upon, it is a matter of continuing along the same lines and committing to the topic. After the music has been chosen, it’s time to get comfortable, to find a place equipped with food and plushy furniture to maximize working potential without causing distraction by interrupting the flow of writing. Writing has always been a way to immortalize a miniscule aspect of myself, to put down any sort of depravity or radical opinion that I could never imagine articulating in regular conversation. There is some sort of sick satisfaction that stems from creating a character that you see parts of yourself in, or in creating one that you want to despise but cannot because they are the symbolic representation of some perverse idea you find yourself drawn to. These final aspects are what make writing simultaneously interesting, attractive and deeply twisted: writers, no matter how humble they appear, are all ego maniacs, shamelessly self-promoting their interest in controversy and addiction to their own opinions.

Writing is like swimming: you can be told how to do it all day long, but in the end you need to jump in and figure it out yourself. And for a while there, you’ll be up to your neck and flailing your arms like a crazy person, but with enough practice you’ll be doing the butterfly stroke like a pro. Or at least not drowning anymore. Hopefully, anyway.

Understanding this concept brings forth one of the greatest challenges I face as a writer: that terrifying beast, originality. Human beings have been living and writing and suffering and thriving for a hell of a long time now, so how can we possibly make anything new out of our existence? How can we reconcile our fear and disdain of the trite and overused with the simple fact that our very lives are cliché? None of our experiences are new ones, none of us have thought anything that someone before us hasn’t also thought, and in the end none of us are special snowflakes. As writers who are expected to make something interesting, thought provoking, and above all, unique from our human experiences, what can we do?

That’s a question I think we’re all still trying to answer. But different authors have tried different approaches. Books like Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses are immensely interesting to me because they embrace the mundane. They don’t take us to Middle Earth, space, or the future, and nothing terribly thrilling or exciting happens. Characters don’t go through dramatic shifts, don’t really have the kind of intense, climactic epiphanies people talk about when you’re told “how to write”, and that’s exactly what makes them so ground-breaking and worth reading. They prove to us that regular life, with all of its regular little problems, is still interesting and worth talking about. And I think that’s important because it reminds us that we are worth talking about. It reminds us that even though the great majority of us haven’t gone through great upheavals or experienced anything that will get us on Oprah, we still have something to say and something to share. These books capture regular life, with its general absence of climactic moments, its worries about parties or money or death, and they still manage to make them interesting. Both novels use words in interesting ways and craft sentences that are as intricate as they are misleadingly simple. These books are great because they redefine good writing and are proof that writing is, at the end of the day, about the words on the page and the way writers can reinvent language itself.

Although everyone has a vastly different approach to writing and reading, one universal truth is that literature is a uniting art. It has been proven that words can transcend language and time and that, as the Latins said, ars longa, vita brevis.