My Literary Pursuits

I first want to extend my appreciation to those of you who continue to read this blog. To me you remain something of a nebulous cloud, that occasionally reveals yourself personally to me, therefore letting me know that I still have readership. Just how many read these words but still remain silent, I guess I will never know. But it is an encouragement at church to receive a comment about something I have written. (It is an encouragement at church to know that the people there are concerned about my life outside of church.) So thank you. But I must also, relate to you my slight absence from this site the past week or two. I have been writing more recently, just not publishing what I write. Blogs and journals are nice and all, but they only detail what is affecting me. They reveal little of how I can affect a page. A writer's goal is not so much in recording everything that happens to him, a writer's goal is to bring out entire themes and meaning that is latent within his human breast. And just merely recording the measly events of my day, and their subjective interpretation is confining to me. My imagination is too rich, where my life is too poor. The unconscious...the horse of any artist, is much too powerful. There's so much within us than what happens to us or even our conscious thoughts. I get this feeling that all this time, I haven't really been writing. -Only dabbling. The supreme act of creation cannot be focused on "me". It must have air...and a sky...and perhaps, a sunset. It must have characters, other voices,...more or less it must be a story. So I have been wrestling with the creative process through writing short stories lately.

Now novels are wonderful. But they are so long. It is hard enough for me to complete a short story, so that is what I am focusing on, currently. Surely, every day I attempt at writing something...which is a new phenomenon to me. Discipline never came easy (a statement that tackles itself.)....and usually I do not write until after midnight. But it is surprising to me what is completed, if only a little bit a day I sit down to write. A story will actually progress and will actually end sometimes. I have written short stories before but it was always a very difficult project, think book reports in the 3rd grade. Though fun, always laborious. And I have come to find out that I really really enjoy dreaming about things to write about than actually writing them. Who knows how many more blog entries I would have written, if to dream up were to write? I did one time when 19 attempt a novel. I think I got as far as page 5 or 6, then I quickly gave it up.

I have tons of ideas for stories, probably more than blog entries, I've just always pushed them off into the la-la land of tomorrow. And I never gave all these characters voices or these plots setting. There in that floating world of possibilities and half-dreams...they sit like bored shadows. (Already another story idea just popped up.) So I am striving to chain myself to some sort of desk and scribble down something each night. Most of these stories will probably be bad. That is...probably incongruous from the different moods that I sat down to write them in, or as I have come to find out, swamped in cheesiness. But the ideas are always fun. The turn of events and the characters are always shifting. It really is an entire different game, than writing down actual events. The way our publishing world works, I doubt publication, which is always a block as to why to actually write. But I guess I must get off my wicked lazy servants' butt, grab that shovel, and dig up that half-buried talent....before...before it is too late.