i feel both upset and awed when i see people who discuss in depth their analysis and their thoughts about their creative process. writers who can talk about their writing, their goals, what questions they were asking and how they wanted to answer them, why a sentence is written like this and not differently, word choices, anything. people who know what they are doing and why. people who can experiment. i am stuck in this strange place where everything is based on, for lack of a better word, intuition. it comes from somewhere in me but i don’t know where or how. my thoughts are half-formed. i start writing and the sentences come but i often don’t have a reason, an explanation, for what i am writing and the choices i am making. i have general thoughts about what i am doing with a work, of course, but often not for the details. they just come, they get written, and then—nothing. i am at the first stage of the process and i do not know how to progress further. it remains somewhat unexplained and so it remains, in a way, unfinished. it’s "unconscious" or "intuitive" or something like that, which is not the way i want to approach writing, or at least i do not want to stay there. it’s what made me, when i was younger, use this cliché idea of the characters having their own life and voice, because it seemed like the words came to me without me making conscious decisions. and that’s not what i want to be doing! but i am there and i feel powerless and stupid in this. i don’t know how to experiment or try things because i always circle back to this. i am very tired of it, of myself. it often feels as though i am incapable of having my own original thoughts. it goes, maybe, with my near inability to analyze things myself; i can take someone else’s analysis, understand it and use it, eventually question it, but i can’t form one on my own. and maybe this is it for writing. it comes from somewhere and this somewhere is me but i still cannot access a more thoughtful approach to it, i struggle to ask how, or even, for details, why. it doesn’t feel like i am truly present with it, like i am making decisions, it’s difficult to discuss my process because it is all so strange. and i don’t want it to feel like this. it feels like a very beginner writer thing to do, a proof of my inexperience maybe, but how do i push through it, how do i change that.
