Kismet, Serendipity and the Like

By far the most rewarding element of this semester has been the weekly blogs. Call it kismet, serendipity or the like, but I feel as though I stumbled upon my soul mate, if a writing outlet could be such a thing.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve known I love to write. I dabbled in academic writing during my high school years, and man, can I kill an expository essay. I was the nerd who competed in academic writing competitions…for fun. Acing English was not even a question in high school.

But nothing about writing an expository essay challenged me when I got to college. I, to some small degree, have “mastered” the formula and in my first semesters as a collegian, I felt as though my creative boundaries weren’t being challenged in the slightest. I can crank out an essay without batting an eyelash.

Journalistic style isn’t for me either. While I do appreciate facts, I love detail and emotion so much more.

I don’t just want to know that a woman was sitting at a coffee shop with her best friend—I want to know what shade of deep blue the one on the left was wearing and what it looked like when the other brushed her dusty blonde hair away from her face, how one furrowed her brow when the other one spoke, how they laughed together,what it looked like when they sipped on their coffee in harmony, and how you could see the years behind their familiar demeanor and the kindness that wafted through the air between them like the smell of coffee.

I’m far too much of a romantic to be a journalist.

So after discovering that about myself, I then moved along to creative writing. I can dig poetry and a short story or two, and I have for as long as I can remember. It fits naturally into my English/theatre nerd side.

I do know I want to write a novel at some point in my life; however, creative isn’t entirely satisfying because it doesn’t reach an audience at this point in my life…particularly, because I don’t have one. I don’t have a demographic of readers, and while I tried to start a poetry blog once upon a time, it made me feel far less cool than I thought it would.

And as I mentioned, it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I would have liked. The canvas was far too blank for my liking. I needed some boundaries, guidance and a story to tell.

In an effort to be entirely transparent, let me try to articulate what I discovered from many hours spent in self-reflection post-stumbling my way through all kinds of writing styles. After taking inventory of my skills, I knew these basic facts at the start of this semester: I have a voice, but I don’t always have a story to tell. I enjoy the analytical element of the expository style, but I don’t like the dryness that comes with it—the same goes for journalism. Essentially, those two are one in the same as far as lack of detail goes.

Up until this point, no writing style has been the right fit. While I know I can write in many different styles, not one has felt entirely like my niche. Creative writing was too wide open and a little dramatic for my tastes, but expository and journalism were too dry and serious. I was in desperate need of a happy medium.

Enter kismet, serendipity or whatever you’d like to call it, in the form of blogging every week for this entire semester. I have discovered “It.” I have found my sweet spot. Nothing fills my heart more than to have an opportunity to use my voice, to report the facts and my thoughts in a detailed and somewhat narrative manner. Blogging is the best of all my literary and creative worlds.

Truly the greatest gift PR Pubs gave me was the nudge toward a profound element of self-discovery: I have found my voice, my outlet and most importantly, my platform of choice. Destiny, fate, or the hand of the Almighty God—I have found the most natural fit for my giftings and I plan to use it to better the world around me in some way.

#Blogging #PR #PRPubs #Discover #Passion