Writing

I have a love-hate relationship with writing. I love the emotional release and satisfaction that comes with penning my thoughts, ideas and stories, but I hate the frustration I feel when I get stuck. I have a few notebooks, and each of them is filled with scrap pieces of paper containing poems, ideas jotted down, diary entries and half-written stories. For a particular page I even wrote just one sentence:

Can't you feel the pain I'm going through?

That's it. It felt like no other words were needed. Then in one poem I wrote:

Perhaps you think it silly

Me with my little fancies---

That's all. Not sure if it even counts as a poem. I also wrote three poems with the same name, 'The Girl at the Window' (inspired by Toto-chan). I sometimes re-read my poems and change a few words but I don't want to make major alterations because I feel the words are reflective of what I was feeling then. I want to retain the spirit of the poems.

Where did this love of writing spring from? Partly because as a young girl I was quite the bookworm and also because of my Primary 5 English teacher who greatly inspired me. She started a journal-writing exercise whereby every week we would write one entry in our journals and submit it to her. Pretty soon I was writing more than one entry per week. I'm not sure if that was something she expected- having to read my numerous entries! She enjoyed it though, and I was her favourite. I even progressed on to a second journal. I still keep those journals now, and the reading the entries made me realise what a precocious child I was back then.