I’m not sure where to begin. Ideas have never been that big of a problem. I guess for me, right now, my biggest obstacle is my own inability to formulate a proper starting point. I have been told, by more than one person that if starting at the beginning doesn’t work, to start somewhere else. After all, it’s not like I’m chiseling any of this in stone. As a matter of fact, the beautiful thing about computers is how easily information is manipulated. If I don’t like how one thing looks or if another doesn’t quite match up to something else further down the line, I can simply delete it and it’ll be as if it had never been at all.
So, we come back to my main dilemma. I don’t know what idea to focus on. I’ve always been the type of person, for as long as I can remember (which isn’t all that much because my memory sucks), to get bored easily. Or distracted. Or bounce from one thing to the next without the slightest bit of thought or consideration. I’m impulsive and prone to random acts of sheer randomness.
I have ideas floating in the cesspools of my imaginative brain, but I just don’t know which to try and cultivate. Previous attempts to keep my focus on more than one thing usually lead to finishing absolutely nothing. This then results in my writing folder on my hard drive to contain a million little word documents that contain small blurbs that ultimately mean nothing.
I feel I need to start with shorter stories. I feel that writing short stories takes a little more effort than writing full on novels or books. A writer of short stories has to learn control. They have to learn how to hone a plot with laser-like precision from start to finish. They have to be short, but contain near the same emotional impact that a novel might contain. They have to be entertaining and keep the reader engaged. They have to be nearly all that a novel is, but…shorter.
Then again, I have to wonder if the ideas I have could formulate into a full-length novel. I’d hate to be one of those writers who publish some 1,500 page book with 1/3 of it containing actual meat while the rest is just that steroid injected chemical attempting to boost the word count. The longest thing I’ve ever written amounted to exactly 91,470 words and it’s a StarCraft fanfic that I wrote back in high school. And, shocking I know, never finished. I actually skimmed through it not too long ago and, wow, it’s horrible in this “my words are all over the place helter skelter” sort of way.
Where was I? Where am I? And there goes my entire train of thought. I’ve been wading through my music library on iTunes. I find myself very connected to whatever creative mojo I have when a damn fine song is playing. I can’t write while the song is actually on, because I end up typing the lyrics (if there are lyrics. I know, music without lyrics nowadays is something most people can’t seem to grasp. Or if the lyrics are about melting popsicles. Really now. Did a five year old write that song)? It says something too, I think, about song writers who can, through the course of an album and with so few words, capture nearly every spectrum of human emotion and lay out the soul in a way a book or a story never really can.
Which is ultimately what I want to do, at some point. I just want to write something real and honest. I’ve been second guessing myself. I’ve been worried about the kind of response I’d get from people. Would my parents approve of this? Is so-and-so going to be mad that I’ve portrayed this like that? Would people think me a loser for writing such and such?
It’s funny, if I put half the amount of energy I put into debating with myself about how people perceive me, I think I might actually have had finished an entire writing project. Imagine that!
Sometimes I talk to myself, but not because I’m crazy or alone or because I like the sound of my own voice (though, come on, like, who doesn’t LOVE my voice); I talk to myself because sometimes vocalizing puts things into a greater focus than just thinking. And sometimes typing out words and posting them on a whim brings a certain sense of clarity. Even if, come the next morning, I find myself wishing I hadn’t.
There is a passage from “Oh The Places You Will Go” that always struck me as the most poignant. It’s the part where our intrepid traveler of life’s highways comes to The Waiting Place. As a kid the imagery sort of freaked me out because everything was so dark and damp and unpleasant. As a kid I never understood the message being conveyed, but now with adulthood and the various experiences that has, for better or worse, helped shape me into the person I am today and will, through the course of more experiences, shape me into the person I shall be tomorrow and the day after, etcetera, etcetera that passage gets to me.
So much so that, after having posted that passage in one of my various other blogs (now all long forgotten R.I.P.) a friend of mine asked me what I was waiting for. Perhaps because I’m impatient and impulsive and prone to flights of fancy, I was waiting for something to fall into place without really having to do much. I mean, come on, awesome things like that happen in movies and television and books. And then throw in the fact that all that kind of imagery is practically force-fed to us by society and wham! But seriously, Jacob, I still don’t have an answer for you.
So back to the beginning. Where to start? Maybe tonight, after I’ve tossed and turned and flipped my pillow end over end to keep it cool and wrapped myself all mummy-like to keep warm and that illusive beast we like to call “sleep” is just within my reach and I’m just shrugging off everything and slipping away it’ll come.
I mean, after all, if not now, when?
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