When Was the Last Time You Wrote Something From The Heart?
The joy of simply creating something beautiful
Recent developments in technology have made my job as a writer more challenging these days.
While blogging wasn’t as competitive ten years ago, it has now become a playing field for the big influencers. If you think about the impact of artificial intelligence, then you know how it has made things even more difficult. Now, we are not just competing with other people or huge companies. We’re even competing with AI!
As a result, writers like me needed to work with double the effort to survive. We needed to update our skills and utilize even AI technologies that made things more challenging in the first place.
Writing these days no longer just meant finding the inspiration to say something amusing, moving or enlightening. We must also think about trending topics and keywords. We must format our posts to rank well when it comes to SEO. And last but not least, we must use the assistance of AI while doing our very best not to be like AI.
With all of these things keeping us busy, when was the last time you wrote something just for the sake of writing it?
I remember the time when I was young and I was still dreaming of becoming a writer.
I imagined my life to consist of creating a whole new universe in my head, visualizing characters I can relate with and devising plots that can excite my readers. I also remembered writing just because I enjoyed it.
Now, I have to intentionally set a time to go back to this mindset somehow.
Because even if I know how important all my other writing-related tasks may be, all of that wouldn’t matter if I lose the passion that brought me here in the first place.
Every now and then, I must write something just for the sake of writing it. I must write a poem or a song because I felt them in my soul. I must write a post because I wanted to share something useful to my readers. And I must write a story just because I wanted to create something beautiful.
I hope you also set aside some time to do the same.
We do need to make a living through writing. But let us not forget to do those things that make our lives worth living for.
“Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you.” — Mark Oliver Everett
“I would like to ask you to think some time - try to imagine working for the pure love of making something beautiful - something that can’t be sold or used to help sell anything else, but that is simply a communication between man and man, a bond of understanding and human enlightenment.” — Hart Crane
“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Jocelyn Soriano is a Catholic author, poet and blogger. She wrote the books Poems of Love and Letting Go, Of Waves and Butterflies: Poems on Grief and Poems for a Faithful Heart: Christian Poetry on God’s Love.
