Seeds of Writing

One night, not too long ago, I was on the way to my friends' house with Ria when we somehow came across the topic of writing. "You don't write anymore." She told me. I reflected on this briefly, wondering why. A few ideas came to mind on how come I no longer wrote, but things I wasn't able to fully explore that night. Nonetheless it stuck with me until I had the chance to set myself down and put my thoughts to paper.

To me the idea of writing is like taking a seed and nurturing the plant that eventually grows. These are small things at first, ideas or scattered little thoughts, what have you. These seeds need to be planted and allowed to take a life of their own. They can also be small fires that burn brighter as they unfold in one's mind, spilling forth onto the pages of one's desired medium. I realized that many of those moments, those seeds or sparks that bear potential to be written, I would perhaps put in a place that was, at least for me, not conducive for growth.

The written word can be one of the most enduring and powerful expressions of humanity as a collective and an individual's soul. It can show one's deepest thoughts and emotions, allowing others to peer into the lives and experiences we write about, to behold our creations and work. It is a wonderful gift to be able to write and harvest from the wealth of one's life.

But like many things which stem from life, writing must also be cared for and nurtured, lest it withers or grows stunted. It must be placed in the right ground and tended to for it to grow, and grow well. I recall a parable from the Bible, one where Christ speaks of the seeds falling upon different kinds of soil.

Writing is not too much different. In some soils it would lie fallow, useless and untapped. In others it might grow slowly at first, but dies as it is choked by weeds and other things. In others it grows quickly but shortly after dies in the shallow dirt, withering away. But some seeds fall onto rich soil, where it can grow steadily and extend its roots, strong and healthy as it rises in the sun.

In the parable, the seeds represent the 'Good Word' of the Lord and the soil represents the different kinds of people who react to it. With writing, I liken the soil to the places and mediums where we choose to write, how we choose to pursue and practice our writing. It is an environment that we must till properly, the seeds of writing demanding a degree of discipline to ensure its growth.

In both cases, faith and writing are largely dependent on a person's choices and disposition. It relies on conscious will on how to act and where to act. And so these seeds grows or withers depending on these very choices on how to pursue their development.

But let us assume that anyone who desires greatly enough to write will actually do so, to exert effort to write as his or her own creativity and inspiration strikes, as habit and discipline drives on to do so, or as duty and obligation pushes one. Given this will or desire, one would then have to make a decision as to where one would plant such a seed of writing.

The medium of our writing is of course crucial, because it forms a great part of the 'soil'. It is my belief that we should chose to write in a medium that begets more writing, greater writing, and deeper writing. A good writing environment and medium could allow us to maximize our creative spark and deeper thinking, giving us a favorable opportunity to draw forth good ideas and thoughts from our inner worlds and set them down for ourselves to reflect on and others to read.

In this age of information and technology, the writer has so many options to chose from. The classic forms of pen and paper are of course always there. Some might even opt for a typewriter, nodding to some sense of nostalgia perhaps. It is something I've done. But what is likely the most common form of writing nowadays, especially for the younger writers (below the age of 40, perhaps?) takes the form of digital writing.

The medium we have now is far more flexible and arguably powerful than what writers used to have before. The internet has given us a channel that lets us reach out far easier and with a broader scope than just a decade or two ago, with the audience that truly includes the entire world. It has given us a huge number of places where we can write and display our work, where with the ease of a few clicks and the dancing of our fingers on plastic keys we can share almost anything we desire to the multitude.

It has given us an entire field with which we can freely sow such seeds of writing, for them to grow and be seen by all. Or for them to wither in a brief span of time, choked by the vastness of the field, or dying when they cannot find purchase in deeper ground. The soil I speak of here, of course, is the plethora of internet sites. Blogs of various forms, online journals, networking sites with notes and journal options, virtual galleries and different kinds of information repositories are just some of what we have access to.

The internet and all of these easy-to-access places have spawned a generation or three of communication. But it is also a dangerous place, not in the moral or ethical sense as that is beyond the scope of my current discourse, but in the sense that one might as easily lose one's inspirations and muses as one might find them. It can turn those who were non-writers into writers, giving them the light of the world to feed on. And it can trap those who do write into shallow loops of action/reaction, giving little room for one's writing to truly grow, for any sparks to build up into a real fire of thought.

So we return to the beginning.

By now some may wonder what this entire thing is for, what I'm actually getting at. Or rather, what is it exactly that I am trying to say and I should just cut to the chase and get past all what might seem like dissembling, that I should speak plainly what this entire diatribe is for. Very well.

It obvious that I am supportive of the Internet as a good ground for people to use and write in. I am also one who feeds on the reaction and comments of my peers and friends and on the quick and healthy discussions that arise from our writings that the Internet makes possible. One could also surmise that the lengthy block of text above was an exercise to jog my mind, to warm up, shake off the cobwebs and get the writer's flow going again.

This writing was also written with a possible audience in mind. This is not hard to tell. But the audience is as much myself as anyone who might read this. It is to me a cautionary tale to be discerning and thoughtful to where I write, to where on the Internet I should roam and attempt to write in, to not allow my writing to be caught up in mediums where I might be unable to pursue or develop the kind of deeper writing or expressions of my thoughts that I would like.

And that is the essence of this piece.

It is also a reminder to be careful of things like Plurk. But that's another entry for another time.