It causes sleepless nights, excessive daydreaming, blank stares, and fleeing from human contact. Hiding in “caves.” Family members don’t always understand me and ofttimes question my sanity and who they THINK I am...who I PRESENT to the world....
Writing.
Besides the pure mechanics of writing (I really do love everything about the process, from vomiting out initial efforts to reworking the stuffing out of my words), I LOVE the imagination! What drives and fuels the imperative to write, to create. It is my sandbox, what I love getting dirty in, and to me, the archetypal endeavor. Voices in my head clamoring to get out; stories dying to be written; characters screaming for LIFE--begging to laugh and bleed across my pages. Ever since I were a wee lad, I’ve always been making shit up. Ask my Dad. Have my Mom pull out my drawings and stories. “Motormouth” was one of my more printable nicknames. I even once wrote a story around the outside of our upstate New York house. Caught hell for that I did.
The point is, I love making stuff up and seeing what can become of said stuff. I love to What-if things; to work out issues; make people (including myself) think. It’s such godlike supremacy on the one hand, utterly childlike (and therefore playful) behavior on the other...and are the two really all that different?
Being The Struggling Writer, I often wonder what it would be like to so totally devote every ounce of your heart and soul into one single, all-consuming passion, an endeavor where every cliché-ridden fiber of your being was not distracted by such mundane concerns as having to “work” for a living; to not have to worry about dividing your energies. I wonder about the lawn being... emeralder.
And transparency! I desperately seek utter transparency!
To be so good at this thing called writing that the words just fade away for the reader. I want readers to not be conscious of whether or not they are actually reading WORDS... but are now actually living STORIES. Totally and embarrassingly absorbed and assimilated into worlds of my making. Disappointed that the tales have come to an end and then ache for more...cannot breathe without getting inside my head and seeing existence through my eyes. To reread...to reLIVE....
Nothing resonates on such a core level with me as does the world of writing. Creation. The imagination.
