Reid asks about the origins of exigency in the writer and honestly I had to look this term up. Exigency (for any of you that skim this to get a basis on how to write your post) is an urgent need or demand. So an exigency to write would be like an urge or a calling to write about something. Whether it be personal or informative, you find a topic and you just write until you’re satisfied.
Recently, I haven’t had exigency to write about anything. My ENC classes offered no outlet to my writing abilities, because all of the topics were either uninteresting to me or done thousands of times before by freshmen. One losses motivation to write when they learn that they have 4 topics to talk about: Drugs, Sex, Politics and Technology. It seems that not a single person in freshmen writing classes writes anything interesting or groundbreaking. Understandably, this is because this is the period when professors teach students how to write. So overall, I feel as if my writing skills have actually declined due to my lack of inspiration.
In high school, I spent a lot of time writing stories and poems. I won’t admit that any of it was groundbreaking or even grammatically correct, but it was so entertaining! I first came up with the idea to write when I started reading those terribly cheap novels on amazon. You know, the ones that you’ll never admit that you read, even to your best friends. I read many of these novels on my kindle at night, not falling asleep till 4 in the morning. I flipped through pages and pages of dystopians, elvish worlds, vampire horrors, infected cities and worse. All of these were trashy $1 novels but I loved every bit of it. Then I figured that I could even write the same kind of stories. Now what follows is pure exigency. I felt motivated to make groundbreaking works in these fields. I even started reading up on Poe, Orwell, Greene, Asimov, Wells, Lovecraft and many others just to get a better understanding of fiction. I was thrilled about writing fiction and I started to find that whatever I wrote followed my mood. I found that when I was blissful because a girl I had a crush on texted me back, I wrote happy endings about heroes conquering their fears. But when I was tackling grief due to the loss of my father and the fracture in my family, my stories were dark and terrifying. They strangely took on a life of their own resembling works by Poe and Lovecraft. I never did any of this intentionally but I found that when I wrote, I wrote what was in my heart at the time.
Now theirs probably something significant that a therapist could tell me about my writing tendencies, about who I am and how it all made me feel, but that isn’t the point of this post. The point is that I miss that. Not reading trashy teen novels and certainly not writing about dark worlds or happy endings, but I miss writing. I don’t want to be forced to write about topics that interest just my professor or topics that everyone in my class wants to talk about. I want to write about something that makes me feel like I have a voice. It’s important to feel exigency while your writing and not just in your fantasy novels, but in your papers too. If we don’t find our topics interesting, then we won’t be interested in what we are writing about. Our papers will turn to mush and the professor will fall asleep reading it. So thank you Julia, for teaching us to love to write again.