Haunted Houses and Writing

A couple of years ago my friends and I went to the Niles Haunted House. Its the go-to place for scaring during the fall. While we were there my best friend and I went through this maze. You had to first go through this part that was set up like a maze of office cubicles. If you wandered long enough and looked pitiful you might get a ghoul or ghost to help you out. Once you finally reached what you thought was the end you had to run through a series of rooms. One of the room that I remember was a room that was all black with black light in it. I also remember there being loud music and a strobe light. It was like a little rave in this room except for the fact you were absolutely terrified that something was going to jump out from behind you.

I relate this experience to writing, or most of it in a sense. When you are given a topic to write about you think about it. You may try jotting various ideas down but I always end up backtracking and taking another route. If all else fails and you can't find your way out or figure out what to write about you seek help, from friends, professors, family, granted they are not as scary as the ghouls and ghosts in the haunted house but they are there for relatively the same purpose. Then finally when I finally figure out what I am going to write about I relate it to I finally got out of the cubicle maze portion of the haunted house. I then have my ideas flowing and I made it through room one. Then...I am in room two. The strobe light, black light room. When I am writing it always seems that for the first part of the process I am breezing right through it. I know what to write about and I know what I want to say then BOOM! I stop. Its like the light turned off. In that moment when I realize that I don't know what to write its like I'm in the dark and am just groping for the exit, then BOOM! its back. I then have to furiously throw everything down that has just come to me before I lose it again. This is like the perpetual flashing of the strobe light. I see moments of inspiration and then they are gone. In those few moments I am scrambling to write down as much as I can as fast as I can before the light gets turned off and I am left in that state of darkness.

Finally when I am done and I have exited the maze I can turn to a friend and we can decompress. We can laugh about the funny things we can laugh at the fact that we wandered the same 5x5 area for twenty minutes. Its like that with writing. Once I have finally finished writing my initial thoughts and they have taken a semi-paper form I can begin to look over them. I can then see what I liked about it and I can organize my thoughts. I can see where I made a wrong turn and where I needed to backtrack and make things more clear. Its the end of the maze where I realize that the writing process wasn't so bad and that maybe as long as I have someone there with my I could potentially do it again.