For as long as I can remember writing has always been an intimate experience for me. There is not a single day that goes by where my mind does not wander, painting a story in my head involving the strangers in my morning commute, an intricate plot that I sometimes get a little carried away with. My weekly commute lets my brain get back to a place where I feel like a child again, kick-starting my imagination and providing more than enough to keep me awake throughout the day. I find that not enough people in the world express themselves with words. Some of us go through our lives and have never put a pen to paper since high school. Those same people are the ones that have never enjoyed a poem, let alone written one, and are the least likely to walk into a book store for leisure.
The Internet has really given us a free outlet to express our feelings. Be it reading news, typing a few quips to followers or sharing your life with long lost high school friends, we have taken our life and digitized it. With “smart” phones that are now connected to the Internet wherever we roam there is no longer a digital divide – we live our lives with computers, no longer amongst them. We can embrace this technology to become a better writer, poet and reader. You can start by creating a free blog over at Tumblr, like I have done for myself, which has an application that downloads right to (most) mobile devices.
I believe that one of the solutions to this growing problem is to identify yourself. If you are on your way into work on the train, riding shotgun on a road trip, or sitting in a boring lecture, scribble your thoughts down on a piece of paper and when you have a free couple of minutes post them up on your blog. Make use of these two hash tags, #iamwriter and #iampoet, to let the world know that you have not forgotten the imagination of your youth. Take your words and post them up for all to see. When you are bored go take a gander at some of the other writers all over the Internet and do what Krista Finch, and so many others are doing. Maybe a little inspiration is all that they’ll need as well.