Trigger

At the beginning of our poetry unit, we talked about a triggering subject.  We even read a book (or a portion thereof) called The Triggering Town, which basically spent a lot of wasted space and wasted language explaining how every poem has a triggering subject and then an actual subject that is the real point of it.  I can't say I necessarily agree with that, but I certainly respect the value it does hold.

I might have gotten over that case of writer's block today.  Maybe.  I mean, I guess I'd have found out if I'd found some time to write, but currently I am too busy catching up from this hellish week to be able to sit down and just write some bittersweet personal prose, no matter how much I would absolutely love to.  Regardless, I am of the opinion that a triggering subject isn't only present in poetry, but also, to a large extent, in prose.

In elementary school, they always called the first sentence of your essay the "grabber" because it had to grab your reader's attention, otherwise they wouldn't want to read the rest.  That's almost the way I see a triggering subject working.  It's where everything begins and the first thing a reader can notice and take interest in.  Or, in the case of a personal narrative or personal writing generally, it may be entirely an internal trigger, that pulls on something and activates the writing mechanism.

Suddenly, the writer's block is gone and you just want to pour out smoothly crafter, half-thought out sentences onto a page because you don't know how to make it stop and you just need to write.  That's the point I hit today.  And a large part of it is that something significant happened in the life of someone I know.  And that made me think about what's happened in my life and how it has affected me and how I felt about it at the time.

That's when the urge to write struck.  Even this blog post is more fluid than usual, especially more so than these late-night ramblings usually are, because the words just flow.  They tumble out of my mind and onto the page because they need to get out somewhere and I can't speak eloquently for the life of me.  In this way I am compelled to write, to pour my life down into characters against a contrasting background, because where else can it go?  What else can I do with them?  In the end, I think, that is why I write.




Note: this post was up on May 11, 2011, but then appears to have gotten deleted while Blogger was in maintenance.  I apologize if it appears later and this turns out to be a repeat.