Writing

A Return to Writing

~ Kristel Marie Pujanes ~ 1 Comment

A friend once told me, “Going back to writing is like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it. Just get back on that seat and practice.” Interestingly enough, that’s what people tell me about driving too. Writing, driving, and riding a bike—the three activities that bring me the most dread these days.

See, at some point last year, I made the crazy decision to take a year-long hiatus from writing. It was roughly around the same time I stopped driving, learned how to ride a bike, and just as quickly unlearned that skill. I took a break from writing to put all my focus on planning my wedding. As for driving, well, stopping wasn’t a conscious choice. It just so happens that everything I need is within walking distance. Plus, I work from home. Taking all things into consideration, this place is the lazy man’s paradise or the consumerist’s version of heaven. You take your pick. And riding a bike? That’s always been more my husband’s interest than mine.

Now, out of those three life skills, writing was the one I felt I wouldn’t have problems going back to. See, I love writing. It’s something that comes naturally to me, or at least it used to. Writing was more than my bread and butter, it was the way I made sense of the world and everything going on around me. It allowed me to reexamine life and put words behind thoughts and emotions that I couldn’t readily express verbally.

To quote Anaïs Nin, “We write to taste life twice; in the moment and in retrospect.” And isn’t every experience bigger—whether for the worse or for the better—in retrospect? To put it in productivity terms, writing was my area and moment of “flow.” I was never a brilliant writer, but what I lacked in technical skill, I made up for in enthusiasm and drive. It’s the incessant pull of es muss sein that can’t be quieted until everything that needs to be written has been expunged. Writing was my lifeline. And for a very long time, Writer was the fulcrum of my identity.

So, as you can imagine, it came as a nasty surprise that returning to writing—especially for pleasure—wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought it would be. I can’t seem to get through one sentence without self-doubt creeping in. Rust has settled in, crusting over that old enthusiasm I used to rely on. The interest is there, the pull is there, but the execution is proving to be agonizing and sloppy. But giving up is not an option. To stop writing forever? That would be my personal hell.

And so, here we are. Tabula rasa. I’ll write. I will chip away at the crust and the rust, fake that old fervor until the upswing of that fever comes to consume me. I will go wherever my writing takes me. And maybe, in conquering this fear of writing, the lever will pivot and I’ll also drive and ride a bike once more.

Welcome, 2015! Ramblings on Writing, Recaps, and Resolutions.

~ Kristel Marie Pujanes ~ 4 Comments

 

One of the highlights of 2014: Boracay.
One of the highlights of 2014: August 2014 Boracay trip

The last couple of years, I wasn’t so much tested by fire as thrown into a furnace and tempered by flames. But soldiering on is second nature when there really is no other option in the horizon other than survival. Being a strong believer in metanoia and tabula rasa, both of which offer the sweet promise of a fresh start, I have decided that this year will be my year of writing, my year of focus and change.

I’ve taken a rather long sabbatical from writing—at least in the public domain. In the last few months, I’ve started a business with good friends, begun practicing my calligraphy, taken up crocheting (for the nth time), and started on my first novel.

For the novel, it’s a constantly evolving creature that recreates itself each time I take out the original file.

I have always believed that in writing, nothing is static; you can draft all the outlines you want, but the end result has more to do with how the work wants to be written. I hold on to the philosophy that writers are merely conduits shaping and delivering what already exists—if not in this realm, then in the world of ideas. But the execution is a pain. The story won’t stay still long enough for me to write it. The characters reject each other with startling regularity—so much so that I’m convinced there’s no other way but to write and write quickly, lest the idea makes its hasty exit as so many better ones have done before.

A few weeks ago, I welcomed my 29th birthday with a list of traits that I wished to improve on this coming year. I have always been a strong advocate for self-improvement but had often lacked the follow-through when it came to these changes. So this year, I will stick to my list and work on being more disciplined, dedicated, persistent, and patient. And while I will not bore anyone else with my lengthy list of goals and plans, I will be more present from this point on. Hopefully, that will be a good thing.

So, that said, let me end this lengthy rambling with my New Year’s wish for all of you. To borrow from Neil Gaiman:

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.”

Happy 2015, everyone! See you all soon!

Featured Author: Philip Yancey

~ Kristel Marie Pujanes ~ 2 Comments

 

In the last few years, I’ve learned that when you talk ‘religion’ with friends or colleagues, 90 percent of the time, you run the risk of offending someone. Yes, faith is a very prickly subject. It’s also highly personal and private. To be perfectly honest, my own faith tends to be ambiguous and ambivalent in turns. So why recommend a Christian author’s works to friends and family members?

Well, for the simple reason that Philip Yancey’s writings aren’t just religious, they’re philosophical. They’re there to get you thinking. In his books, Yancey doesn’t tell you what or how to think; he offers you ideas and leaves the thinking (and believing) up to you. He treats the subject with ample delicacy but maintains integrity when tackling it. His books also offer a fresh perspective to what you already know, or think you know.

About the Author:

Philip Yancey (born 1949) is an award-winning evangelical Christian author. With over 14 million books sold worldwide, he’s one of the most read Christian authors today. He’s won a number of book awards including the Gold Medallion Book Award and the ECPA (Evangelical Christian Publishers Association) Christian Book of the Year award.

When Yancey was just about a year old, his father succumbed to polio after members of their strict, fundamentalist church convinced his dad to go off life support. They believed that his faith in God would heal him. His father’s death combined with his experience of witnessing contradictions between what the church taught and what it practiced, contributed to Yancey’s loss of faith. It would a take a miraculous moment in Bible College for him to experience a form of metanoia (spiritual conversion).

Since then, Yancey has been tackling some of the most basic and hardest questions and issues on Christianity. He’s penned thought-provoking Christian books like What’s So Amazing about Grace (1997), The Jesus I Never Knew (1995), Disappointment with God (1988), and Reaching for an Invisible God (2000). Yancey has also contributed works to publications like Reader’s Digest, National Wildlife, Publishers Weekly, Eternity, Moody Monthly, Chicago Tribune Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post.

Website: www.philipyancey.com

 Favorite Work: Disappointment with God (1988)

Other Recommended Books from this Author: Where is God When it Hurts? (1977), The Jesus I Never Knew (1995), What’s So Amazing About Grace (1997)

Image: Christianpost.com

Featured Poem#1: Mirror – Sylvia Plath

~ Kristel Marie Pujanes ~ 8 Comments

Every writer (successful, aspiring, failed, or whatnot) has an interesting anecdote on that “something” that got him/her started on writing. My “something” was Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror”. I don’t remember much of the details. I know it was in high school at my Creative Writing class under my then-favorite teacher. I remember him handing out copies of this poem and later, reading the poem out loud to a quiet audience.

Don’t get me wrong. There was no lightning bolt. No lightbulb. No sirens. No Eurekas! No exclamation points. There was just this stillness. This incredible stillness. It was dread, resignation, elation, calm, peace, understanding, and truth (a glimpse of the absolute truth?) all rolled into one. It was a lingering ache that stayed for days.

I knew. I didn’t want to be a writer, I needed to be one. I realized that it didn’t matter what I did in the mean time, I would always go back to writing. To borrow from Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being: “Muss es sein? Ja, es muss sein!”

Reading this poem ten years later, it still makes me feel the same way.

Mirror – Sylvia Plath

I am silver an exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful,

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Book #4: A Room of One’s Own

~ Kristel Marie Pujanes ~ 6 Comments

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Author: Virginia Woolf
Genre: Non-Fiction; Essay
Rating: A+
First Published: 1929
Status: Reread
Pages: 98

Like revolutionary poetry, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” ignites the passion to write, to be heard, and to persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable circumstances.

In this extended essay on “Women and Fiction”, Woolf posits that ‘…a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ She speaks of this room as a figurative space where a woman can think and exist away from the constraints of a patriarchal society and unaffected by the misogynistic views prevalent in early studies of her sex.

According to Woolf, for centuries, society has kept women from writing by limiting their financial resources and forcing them into the roles of mother, daughter, wife, mistress, and homemaker. These roles enable women to serve as ‘looking-glasses possessing magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’, (p.29). Yet even at their most docile, women seem to pose as a threat to even the greatest of men. Men ‘insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they [women] were not inferior, they [men] would cease to enlarge.’

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