To balance. The world requires an involvement in it—an involvement
that I sometimes feel I champion more than other writers—but there are moments
when the activities and challenges of the world seem to be nothing more that roadblocks
to achieving creative ends.
I am a college student, as aforementioned in other posts, and I love it.
I love learning, I love the work that is doled out, I love the discussions I
have in and outside of the classroom, but (and this but can be a large but at
times) I feel like it is a bit like walking backwards. It feels like a large
moment of inactivity, for the things discussed in classes are often topics
discussed with the same amount of depth amongst my philosophical and author-status
friends. Not to mention that those whom I have talked with who have graduated
with their bachelor’s degree in recent times do not have a job, and not just
don’t have a job in their field of study, but they cannot even find a position
working as a cashier at the local Walmart.
All of this emptiness and then college studies also
manage to interfere with creative endeavors. These are the arguments against
higher education, but there are so many more for it, and, for this purpose, I
still support it. Which then allows for the entrance of the question: how does
one find a balance between the academic and the creative?
This is a question that I will not purport to have the
answer to, but I will refer unabashedly to my own experience (this is a blog
after all, isn’t it supposed to be self-indulgent?).
Endless homework stacked on top of actual work with
social activities slid into the empty spaces leaves little room for sitting and
staring at a blank page for several minutes until an idea finally strikes. This
is the real issue that must be conquered. There is always a short ten or twenty
minutes that any person can find in a day that are not scheduled, it is
learning how to utilize that time. So, I don’t have several minutes to just sit
and stare at a blank screen, that must mean I have to approach a piece of paper
or a computer screen with the objective to write, and then do so without
further hesitation.
There is something organic, I feel, that comes from those
words that one forces to spill out onto a page in a moment of immediacy.
Sometimes thinking over a sentence or short story concept or scene can actually
cripple what might have initially flowed onto the page if the writing had never
been inhibited. I think of Franz Kafka and his mode of writing. The Trial was his favorite piece of
writing that he created, and he wrote that in one sitting. Not that a piece of
writing should be left alone once written—God forbid!—one should always return
and edit, but the action should be natural, and that natural action is enabled
by a sudden ebullition of words.
So how do I balance my artistic endeavors with the stress
of an overly-full academic schedule? I use it as an opportunity to force myself
to write in those spare moments, to, in the words of Jack London, go after
inspiration with a stick. After all, if working in the in between hours was
good enough for Franz Kafka it’s good enough for me.
