I'm a writer

It's strange how nervous I get before I am about to start writing. Not this blog. But when I am about to write... for professional reasons. A feature for my newspaper, mostly.

Why, I wonder.

It isn't like I won't be able to write. I always manage to end a story I begin. I always have. It's but natural you will.

But I just get so tensed. William Zinsser said a writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing. Makes so much sense. It is scary.

Scary, because once it's not begun you don't know how it will turn out to be.

I get scared.

When I was younger though, working for newspapers as a reporter in my oen country, writing a news story was like a piece of cake. I could generate three or four stories in a matter of one hour, and I could do it blindfolded.

Not a thought about what to write, how to form a story. Just write the damn thing as if I were copying it from somewhere and just typing it out. That fast.

It was always an almost-clean copy. There was never no nervousness.

But now I want to raise my bar, all the time. Write, to prove a point to myself, all the time. I just know, if I like it, chances are other people will as well. It's how I feel.

It's just so emotionally exhausting. To write.

I go into a trance when I write. Like I was the only one on the planet. What's happening around, who's saying what... it's all just a haze.

It's just the screen in front of me, the keyboard below my fingers, my eyes glued to the half-written sentence in front. Not even a blink.

I'm scared, all the time, to go into that trance. Because then, the outer world around me has disappeared.

I get lonely. There's no one around me. I'm deaf. I'm lost... in a world i'm creating with my fingers.

It's scary.

But I'm a writer. It's what I do.

No, the act of writing is not fun. Typing that full stop after your last word of your work, however, is ecstatic - a feeling I cannot possibly describe.

As if you weren't breathing all this while, and suddenly after that full stop, you breathe out. Relief.

For that feeling, I'm ready to go into that scary trance again and again.

It's what I do.