The writing. The actual writing.
It's like taking the actual orange and comparing it to the concentrate or something. It is the pure, unrefined stuff that can taste wonderful and bitter at the same time, depending on what you get this time around. The actual writing, the actual feel of the keyboard under your fingertips, watching the words fly across the screen, and sometimes not even knowing where the words come from.
I suppose in a different time I would say it wasn't me that was typing these stories up. And in a lot of ways I still believe that.
Because in all reasonable aspects, I am not this interesting. The stuff that I write does not reflect on me. The stuff that I write is like someone has been whispering into my ear at night and I barely remember it in the morning. Someone has given me the clump of coal to make into a diamond, I just have to figure out how to refine it. Something like that. God, is there any way to describe this feeling?
Some of these stories I write have been going on (the longest) for eight years. Eight years. Eight years. How can I be writing something--the same story, mind you--for eight years? Is that natural?
I say sometimes that poets are like those new modern-art painters and writers are like sculptors. That the poets do everything in one quick rush and surge of emotion and...! Sometimes it turns out great and more then likely it turns out like crap. And then the writers, the real writers, the ones that actually take the time and the effort to really go into their stories and let themselves be captured, they are like sculptors that come time and time again to the same friggen block of marble and chip a little bit away at a time, and prefect it. Smooth things out, chip here and chip there and make this and that and thus-and-so better, until you have a masterpiece. Likely not everyone will think it of such, but you gave it time. You gave it effort.
And those poets out there, cause I know you're out there and unfortunately you outnumber me and yell at me sometimes, I know that you say sometimes that I do not understand your craft.
But sometimes when I'm in the midst of this, I feel like I do. I am feeling it untapped. Someone gives you a dribble and I get a waterfall.
Why else is it that I stand under the night sky and feel like I'm falling into it? That just staring up at the stars each and every night moves me to tears? That no matter how warm the night, I ALWAYS have gooseflesh as soon as I walk out into it? That I hide behind thick curtains and bright lights and loud music to just make sure I don't feel it, because if I do it'll overwhelm me? Why is it that all my best work is done after I've laid out there on the grass of my front lawn?
And I honestly think that these are not my stories. That I am being guided and pushed by some force that is not my own. Because every story that I have ever written that has been worth a flippin dime has come from dreams and from sudden creative bursts. When I sit down and say, "Okay, I'll write something now"... nothing comes. That I have to be moved. That my "inspiration" comes from whispers of the night? That I will sit and write ten pages in an hour from just the way the candle moves?
And these aren't my thoughts. They just can't be. Like I said, I'm boring. Very boring.
And half the time I think I'm completely off my rocker. And I'm afraid of what people will think of me when I tell them this. That I think these things. That you will all stare at me strange and slam me in a padded cell where I will be tormented because this is how it is for me. This is how it is. This is how it's always been.
Yes, always been. Because since I can f*cking remember, I have been writing. Or have been moved to write. That the only time I feel completely alive and whole is when I'm letting the words flow.
And I am the story weaver. I weave a tapestry that tells a story. But I am merely the story teller. I do not create the stories. The stories have created me.
And does that sound crazy? It does. It does...
but i think its true.
