Composing: An Out of Body Experience

Creation has, and will always be, a very personal experience.  My creative process taps into my writer’s self, which is separate from my overall social perspective.  When I create, I dream, write, edit, compose, and produce a final product.  

For academic purposes, I’m on autopilot at times, generating facts and byproducts of textbooks.  I focus more on technicality than creation.  

But when I truly create, when I compose to the very best of my ability, I become someone else.  When I write poetry, stories, paragraphs to my own specifications, that’s when my writer’s self emerges and my social self falls to the background.  It’s a difficult process to explain, but I have always been amazed at what I see on the paper when I write creatively.  

I first discovered this separate self ten years ago when I began writing poetry.  It was as if I wasn’t present during the writing, that the words came on their own accord and arranged themselves how they wanted to be.  I was merely the instrument, not the creator.  I’ve always believed that true ideas sprout alone.  I have never created an idea.  An idea has never “occurred” to me.  They come as they please and go as they wish because they are like guardians of the mind.  They come at the right time at the right place.  

My composing process has only been to release these ideas as they happen by.  I know something is truly good when I can scarcely remember putting the words to paper, yet there they are before me in my own writing, lines upon lines.  

Writing shouldn’t be forced and technical.  It should come naturally, as my creative process does.  If I am struggling with a concept or idea, it wasn’t meant to be at that time. 

I return to topics I struggled with often to find that I can easily arrange paragraphs and make concepts clear, even if it’s a topic that I struggled with the week before.  Editing and revising are the perfect concepts to represent the vision of ideas controlling the writer.  Ideas reveal themselves to us, we don’t force them.  Ask any student struggling with a paper: ideas can never be successfully forced out on paper.  Any teacher knows when a student has fought to grasp at a topic for a paper.  

Ideas are just as uncontrollable as thoughts.  Writing is just as unpredictable as life.  You never know what will inspire you.  You never know when an idea might stop by.  You just never know…