What happened to my Flame?

There it is, for one fleeting moment I can feel it… and then it’s gone. The motivation, or should I just call it the flame? The drive to write. It’s a sad thing to grow older, and an even more dismal thing to lose that flame.

I still remember sitting in the back of my parents’ car in 2008 (or was it 2009?) with my, then new but now old and irreparable, Toshiba. I was religiously writing my story and thinking about how I would post that chapter onto Young Writers Society later and request a review. I was full of hunger. I wanted to get better and I wanted to have people read my work, my flame was a roaring bonfire illuminating the moonlit Finnish roads as we drove from my grandmother’s place up in Ostrobothnia back to Vantaa. For some reason those roads were, and are, very dark, despite the fact that there are street lamps. The lamps are seldom on for a long stretch of the way, and the road is surrounded by thick forest on both sides creating the illusion that you’re driving in the forest. 

Back then it was a different time, I was vaguely aware of some financial crisis brewing in the US, I remember talk about a stimulus package on the news and how apparently many economists believed it impossible for the relatively newly elected Obama to reverse the US debt growth rate even if he was elected for a second term. I was vaguely aware of the comings and goings of the so called real world. Russia Today was still loved by the so-called left-wing liberals, ironic when you think about it now. My biggest worries were how my chapter would come out, and that cute girl I had been messaging on MSN Messenger… She’s dead now, suicide as I was later told. I remember that back then I had tens of stories in my head, I would like to say hundreds, but even my imagination had limits. I had a world I wanted to create, a world I wanted to put on paper and share with everyone. Each character I wrote about had a clearly defined personality in my head, but I had always struggled with dialogue. I just somehow couldn’t do it as well as Pratchett I often thought to myself.

My sense of humour and the themes of my works were very much derived from the media I digested back then, much like it is the same even to this day. I often wonder if the reason I haven’t written fantasy for a long time because I seldom read fantasy myself anymore.

I don’t read much at all these days, or, well… Depends if we’re counting news and studies. News and studies. War and disease. I’m not sure when I exchanged the fantastical wars for the ones fought with gunpowder and steel and magical curses to staph infections and acute abdomens, but I think it was gradual. I was still smuggling my fantasy books into chemistry lectures well into my first year, then again, those chemistry lectures were dreadfully boring otherwise, but I think I’d lost my flame much earlier. Was it when I realised that my fantasy wouldn’t go anywhere? I realised at some point that despite having what I thought to be a fantastic world swimming in my head and an epic I thought should go on paper, at some point I realised that I wouldn’t follow through. I had written the beginning, but I had no idea how to write the middle. As I later read back all that I had written on that night ride in 2008 I was shocked. I was shocked at how shit I had been. How had I thought that THIS was good writing? It was rushed, it didn’t make sense, and the writing was subpar. I edited it, and I told myself that everyone is their own worst critic and that the text is probably better than I gave myself credit for, but deep down I knew I was lying to myself. Clearly, fantasy wasn’t for me. Although, for the record I still think that the world that is in my head is amazing!

I still had some flame in me though, throughout high school I began writing another story, this one less fantastical but also fiction. This story was dark, brooding, and edgy. I knew where I wanted it to go but not HOW I wanted it to get there. I knew I wanted it to shock, and this time I knew I had arrived at a sweet spot because people outside of the internet were taking an interest, my classmates asking me for updates on the chapters. I was eager to indulge them, but then it hit me, the writer’s block. I don’t think I have written fiction properly after that. I hit the end of a road there I think. Something about that block was insurmountable for me and compounded with my real-world responsibilities I left writing.

I only rediscovered writing in University after a petition I had written to the Finnish government out of my own initiative without the help of any organisation spread across the Finnish social media circles and in the span of a few days amassed over 10 thousand signatures. A small amount in American standards, I know, but to me it showed something. What I wrote could affect the world around me if I could engage people and get them interested, and this was fuel to my flame. During the next year I found myself experimenting with writing short science news posts onto Imgur and 9GAG to varying levels of success. I found a niche for me on meme platforms where my style of crudeness and brand of cynical edginess often gained approval, which in hindsight seems childish to me despite that being only 3-4 years ago. Soon enough I realised that most people cared little for real science, well not as much as I did anyway, and were more entranced by pop-science like “Scientists prove that introverts who eat chocolate are smarter than Einstein!” Now I still deeply detest pop-science for cheapening all the work that real scientists do to deepen our knowledge of the world each day. I gave up with the science news and switched to regular news. I wrote a few short summary articles on a few news stories from around the world. Used paint to make some title headings and posted it. I woke up the next day with my post on the 9GAG frontpage, my notifications filled with messages. I decided to make a new one, doubtful that the lightning would hit twice. Not only did the lightning hit twice but this time the 9GAG mods took notice and took the liberty of giving me my own custom picture for the post.

I began writing these posts with 3-4 short summary articles almost daily, then it grew to 4-5 and 5-8, suddenly they weren’t just summary articles anymore, they were articles encompassing information from multiple sources with my analysis and comments given on the side. Some hated it and others loved it. I eventually had around 1000 people asking me to tag them in any new posts I posted, and I regularly got between 3000-20,000 upvotes per post, but I was posting more seldomly as the workload had grown considerably. I’d made an email so readers could contact me and contact me they did. My most memorable contact was from a teacher who thanked me for making news and politics interesting to his students. HE told me that the students hadn’t really cared about news or politics before but now they would discuss these things in class after reading my posts and comments… That was humbling, and frightening. As more and more people told me that I was their only source of news, and more and more people told me that my interpretation was their interpretation I started feeling pressure. A pressure to perform. To be unbiased, but also to give good commentary, to have all the facts and to be funny while delivering them. My flame had become a chore a slightly popular chore. The interval between posts got longer as the workload of the writing fought with the workload of my studies and my motivation was dying out as well. Not because of the readers but because of myself, because of the way I had gone at things. The final nail in the coffin was when I noticed that posts that should’ve been going up to the trending pages and hot pages because of the vote algorithm used on 9GAG were staying in fresh despite getting sometimes 1000 upvotes in a day I realised that my posts were being kept in fresh on purpose. I guess seeing my news posts multiple times a week on the hot page was getting old for the 9GAG mods and I thought that this was as good of a time to stop as any and focus on my studies.

All of this had happened around the time the Brexit vote had happened; the vote had some profound effects on my life and my plans for my future and had led me to the wondrous world of Eurofederalism. I soon diverted all that pent-up need for writing into fruitless online debates and discussions on world politics, economic policy, law and ethics. I became very active in the online Eurofederalist circles, so much so that I was invited by three organisations to start a Finnish chapter for them. I declined each time, as much for the reason that I didn’t believe that I had the time for such a task nor the resources as for the reason that I no longer lived in Finland… But when I was contacted on whether I wanted to become a Facebook editor for an online citizens’ volunteer publication called Europe Today I accepted quickly.

That was less than a year ago.

Now my reading habits have changed. Magic changed to Machiavelli, swords changed to anthropology books, dragons to economic theory and epic quests to socio-political philosophy. I can see the shift in the things I write. I recently brought back my news posts, this time exclusively on Facebook under the name Anzius. I already had some 300 followers on that page some of whom had apparently been surprised by my sudden disappearance. As my reading habits had changed I noticed that so also had my writing habits. I wrote my first non-studies related and not-news work in a long time. It was a text on why everyone should study Mandarin Chinese. I posted it on Young Writers Society as well. I marked it as satire because while I had started it seriously I ended up throwing in jokes and I wasn’t sure how to label the work. I read through it again recently. I’m still happy with it. I think it is a well written work. Which is a first for me when reviewing my own work.

While I wish I still had that drive to write fantasy. While I still have that world flying around in my brain I do not think I have the flame for it. But that doesn’t mean I have no flame at all. It’s just that when the old flame got extinguished a new one was lit from another wick.