Another year, another yearly update of one of the first “overexposed”-esque like series, The Voiceless Rant.
I think I say this every year, but I can’t believe just how far we’ve come from feeling like my thoughts and feelings were just “voiceless rants” whenever I would speak. I guess they turned into “overexposed” posts once I realized that I needed to believe what I was writing (and saying) before anyone else was going to believe it.
Anyway, let’s get right into it.
It’s truly crazy to think that this time 10 years ago, I was a junior in college wrapping up my fall semester writing a script of a short film for my final project in my screenwriting class. It came to me as if it was second nature, especially these were characters I’ve played around with for many years before. Although it has been more recent since I started writing my stories into series here on the blog, I always found people listening to me whenever I told my stories. I have a distinct memory being in the 8th grade, talking to my best friend on AIM about a story of a group of teens that were friends, kinda like the one we were both a part of at the time. I wish I saved those conversations just to reread the stories I told of my characters; God knows how cringey they would seem to me now.
But creative writing has always been my “star of the show”, meaning I was never great with my own words but when it was telling fictional stories and writing poetry, everyone would listen. Does that naturally come to writers? Sometimes I really do sit back and ask myself, “when did I decide that being a writer was now a part of my identity?”
Maybe it was when I was in the 5th grade, doodling in different notebooks of the characters that lived in my imagination, telling their stories through drawings and storyboards and actually acting them out as I went along. Maybe it was int the 6th grade, writing a poem in the schoolyard during lunch about a boy I had a crush on and read it to a group of girls who were also into writing poems. Maybe it was in the 8th grade, reciting a poem I created for our Ballroom dancing event that everyone applaud for and told me how good the poem was to them. Maybe it was during my sophomore year in college when I wrote a piece about the most traumatic event in my life up to that point, shared it, and received the validation I yearned for when trying to tell my side of the story.
Maybe it was my first year in grad school, contemplating whether or not I should start a blog to post my writings on.
I don’t remember exactly when my identity as a writer truly started, but it has been such a long and tiresome journey to be where I’m at with it. I grew up thinking that if I didn’t write for a living and make money off from it, then I wasn’t a real writer or storyteller. I grew up and surrounded myself with other writers and always felt like their stories were just better told than mine, which meant that no one really wanted to listen to what I wrote, even if those writings were a sequence of poems of me contemplating suicide for months on end when I was 18. I grew up with people telling me I wasn’t qualified to be a writer because I was horrible at it. That mindset made me almost fail my first semester English course because I lost my passion for it briefly during this time.
But that’s just a lot of the obstacles needed to be where I’m at and feel okay about it as well. Fr starters, I’m not an upcoming author with books waiting to be published and a saga waiting to be made into feature-length movies. I’m not even in the world of writing as a career! I’ve come to terms that writing is more of an outlet for me. It’s become a space where I can speak out and talk about things I would normally keep to myself at my 9 to 5. It’s become my space; one that I am solely in by myself but have ceiling to floor glass windows looking into it. I love sharing my writing and I love being able to tell the stories of these characters in a more expressive and organized way. Before 2020, they lived in my head for decades!
Being a writer to me just means that I value the words I write more than I can speak them. I am able to filter out the filler of a sentence and think about what is it that I’m truly trying to say without feeling vulnerable and put on the spot. I am able to edit and revise and make the words sound better by focusing where in the story the most emphasis should be on, and I am able to get out of my own head for a couple of minutes and become Grace or Jamie, Milo, Sophie, or Mollie, Micah or Rosie, Milo or Jennifer, or everyone else in between in my writing. After all this time with these characters and these stories and being a writer for over a decade, I am still so in love with it.
And I guess that’s what being a writer means to me. I write because it’s truly my best voice. I write because its stayed my passion for so many years and I still get so excited to sit down and write. As for LFL posts, I’m excited to see where the future of these stories being told. As you may know, The Something Series is coming down to its last couple of posts before the series finale early next year. This was a series I started all the way back in 2020, so when it finally comes to an end, I am going to be devastated to leave that particular universe. But, I am ready to say goodbye to these two and allow their story be told outside of the series. I’m excited to devote more energy to the other series going strong on the blog, preferably y2katalogue: the tapes. There’s so much left in store with all of these characters and their stories, so please stay tuned to them and I really hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
I love being a writer. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the world; honestly.
Letters From Liz. 