A River Around the World
by Natalie Robin
I am starting to resent looking out windows and seeing nothing to extract. I think I have sucked all the life out of the places that I frequent and perhaps I need a new atmosphere. Familiarity is nice, but I feel like the kind of writer who is only inspired by flux. I feel a richness in my senses when I am somewhere I have not been before and I wish there was a river that flowed through every back-country and metropolis where I could sit in a little oaken boat and write as I’m carried along.
I still obviously experience many things in the humble route of my day, but many I am hesitant to venture an attempt to transcribe. Not only do I not want to do those experiences a disservice by placing a cage of words over them, but when I choose to use emotion over logic as the mediator between the happening of events and the communicated experience of those events, a parasitic self-consciousness leeches into my heart and reddens my visceral blush.
Though despite the many inevitable tensions in writing that I recognize, the only choices I see for myself are to either stop writing or get over it and practice my prose.
obsessed 
Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how life experiences translate into writing. More specifically, do I have enough interesting experiences in my own life to entertain a prospective reader? It’s a dilemma that I haven’t yet figured out a solution to. Do I give up my cushy job to travel in a foreign land for a year? Or do I just hope I have a never-ending pool of inspiration from which to draw?
I don’t think a writer need necessarily have a catalog of interesting experiences to be able to write something of quality or interest. Some people see the most seemingly banal things or ideas and are able to verbally render them in a way that makes the reader long for the most simple of experiences. I think when I referred to looking out the window and “seeing” nothing to extract–it’s not that the view has nothing to offer but that I am failing to see the possibilities in it. I don’t really think you have to go anywhere to be a writer, or a good one at that, and maybe it’s my problem for not seeing that my everyday, immediate world is fluctuating all the time. I think it’s just easy to miss when you know exactly where you’re going.
I remember getting frustrated with how my fiction writing classes were conducted while I was in college because my teachers stifled creativity. Now that I’ve got a degree in my hands declaring that I can write, the influx of ideas that once kept me afloat have dried up. Obviously, traveling wouldn’t fix anything. When I look at San Francisco, I see cars and train, commuters and hobos, but none of it registers. Where stories once burst forth now it’s just bitter reality. Is this how adults see the world?
I’ve always had a hard time in writing classes as well, though I feel stifled by my own means all the time–professors just don’t seem to help the endeavor. None of San Francisco registers for me either, and I think perhaps that’s what I meant by the pen-worthy is easy to miss when you know where you’re going–the inspiration I mean, gets clouded behind all the aforementioned things you named that you see on a daily basis. They scream for attention (especially the hobos) to the point where you’ve put the familiarity of it all out of mind by way of acceptance, but in this acceptance where your mind believes it knows exactly what it’s going to see–and therefore causing you to pay less attention, you maybe sacrifice the possibility of seeing the subtleties that roam quietly among the commotion.
San Francisco has done this to my brain before.
The wealth of its history (artistic content) surmounts its actual current existence.