As  a University Student, the amount of homework in my life is inversely proportional to the amount of happiness I feel.  Regardless of how much homework I have to complete, however, I usually have to force myself into shutting my computer, turning off my music, and leaving my friends because otherwise, I simply won’t get anything productive done.  While I’m sure this is the problem that most students face, I have another barrier to conquer before I can actually sit down and do the pile of homework that I’ve been neglecting- all the stories floating around inside my head.

From the time that I could read, I started to make up my own stories, sometimes with the characters that I read about and other times with new, original characters of my own creation.  Now that I’m actually proficient in taking those ideas and manipulating plot and character into a succinct narrative, these ideas have become something of a problem.  You see, I’m a procrastinator- but not necessarily in the typical sense.  Where others talk on the phone or play video games or go out, I have a problem with pushing aside all of my creative ideas in order to do the work that was actually assigned.

While having all of these ideas is not a problem per se, it certainly presents a great deal of distraction.  For example, I have been working on a piece about my friends for a little less than six months now and while they’ve all been harassing me to work on it more, I am constantly fighting with myself in order to circumvent doing just that.  To be honest?  If I was guaranteed that I could quit college and have a publishing deal, I would do it in a heart beat.

A lot of the ideas that I have come from pop culture phenomenons, pieces of television shows that they talk about but don’t show or maybe scenes that I think should have been expanded upon.  Those ideas are easier to deal with because I don’t have to come up with the character’s psyche- it’s already there in the canon pieces, so it’s more  the actual plot and narrative itself, rather than all of the things that go towards literature.  These pieces I can usually write out really quickly, just to get out of my head and get back to the things I should be doing.

It’s such an internal conflict when you know that you have things that are due, things that are going to be critiqued and graded and analyzed, and you still can’t stop thinking about people and situations that aren’t even real.  Because honestly?  If you don’t get those stories out of you head, nothing bad is going to happen.  Your life is going to keep on chugging forward into the unknown abyss, whether those characters get their day or not.  But the thing is- just because nothing bad is going to happen when you don’t tell those stories doesn’t mean that nothing good won’t come out of it either.

Because what if my story changes somebody’s life?  What if the things that I have to say are what people have been waiting for?  What if I tell myself that I’ll write it down later, do my homework, and then forget what the story was even going to be about?  In a fleeting second, that idea is gone- lost forever to the human mind.  And we can’t get them back.

So yes, it is an internal conflict every, single day to just not throw in the towel, move back home, and take up writing- fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, children’s books, romance, anything- it’s a struggle to stifle the creativity in favor of productivity.  There’s not enough hours in the day for me to get done everything that I have to do and still have enough energy to do the things that I want to do- and I want to write.  I want to create characters and plots worth reading about.  I want someone, somewhere to read what I have to say and feel differently because of it.  I want to write because I feel like I have something to say, and it’s such a struggle to have to push that aside in order to do banal exercises in Spanish or the like.  It’s just that when you know what you want to do for the rest of your life, you want the rest of your life to begin as quickly as possible.  And me?

I want to write.