Its late night, or very early morning. And sometimes when I sit looking out at the half darkness of night in Philadelphia, I think a lot about writing. I seem to do a lot of writing. It started with journals or diaries as I called them when I was younger. In part, I think, I was influenced by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote wonderful stories about her life, all from diaries that she had kept. I didn't really know how to write or for that matter how to read. But I understood what a story was. Most of the diaries I started, even those from high school, did not survive past a couple of weeks. Some barely made it past the first day.
There are several diaries with horrible large scratchy handwriting, which speak to the horrid ability of my youth to get my thoughts on paper. I could tell a story. I could tell wonderful stories. I could not write them. I still wonder if I am better suited for the oral tradition of story telling. The one were the words can't be on the page, because the story lives in the words spoken and in the voice that speaks them. There is something wonderful and strange and comforting about a story remembered and retold through the ages. One that can never really be written down, because it can not live on a page. It lives in the memory of those who are closest to it.
Nevertheless, I have always striven to put my thoughts onto paper. Partially out of a need to grow myself for school, partially out of a thirst to somehow find a solidity, an immortality, for my thoughts. Through high school I struggled, found my voice, lost it, found it again. I fell in love with poetry and the Bard. I spent hours struggling with my grandmother and mother, who tryed to tutor me. I spelled the simplest words wrong, but somehow understood and read novels far above the heads of most of classmates. Slowly, horridly so, I began to put story to page. Sometimes failing utterly to get my imagination to work towards anything coherent.
The summer after I graduated from high school, while working as I lifeguard, I started my first novel. It was not really to write a novel, it was a need to write. I was terrified of getting to college and not being able to write at the same level as my peers. The story is still unfinished, like so many stories I have started. But I still have the ragged note book filled with my chicken scratch. From this poor notebook, I moved onward to my first journal. The first journal that I would fill over time with pictures, thoughts, poems, ideas of stories, and a slowly growing sense of the power of written word. Various papers from classes joined my journal and my first tries at plays. My spelling got slowly better and I learned to use my thesaurus more then any other book.
Amongst plays, papers, poems, and my slowly filling journals, came a slowly growing understanding of my imagination. My dreams and wakeful right brain grew to be a strong part of my writing. Growing to the point of an annoying three year old that doesn't understand no and is always asking for candy. I feed it. Let it grow strong. Let myself get lost in dreams and stories. And slowly the ideas grew from short stories and poems, to novels. Epics. Stories formed, fed by my never ending imagination. And as college ending these stories had more time to grow, as my mind was left with no way to spend its creativity.
I can go weeks without writing a word. My mind is kept on reading books and watching movies. I take in information like a dry sponge. I soak up everything about me. Then slowly all of that information leaks out. It finds its way into stories, unfinished novels, poems, posts, and often in beaten up journals. And when I look over all of it, I find a few good pieces. Things that I find myself, feeling lucky to have written. As if ever thousand or so words, I strike some kind of gold.
I know that there are others who write with more genius. Others who have better training, better grammar, and the ability to finish what they begin. Still I need to tell the stories. Find a way to put all that oral history, all my knowledge, creative, and longing, in some stoney eternal ink. Wether it is the virtual ink of this online blog or the soon to fade blue ink I scratch across the pages of my red journal. Words have a endless, eternal way about them. I guess I want part of myself to be left in with them eternal, meaning something, even if it is a fleeting glimpse of a whimsical, speratic mind.
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