There's a scene from a story that I've been wanting to write since I was in my twenties that has looped on repeat for years now. At some point I screwed up the courage and wrote it down. It was actually the first creative writing that I'd done since a creative writing course in college.
Almost every time I think about it, it brings me to tears.
Let's be clear, I'm not saying that the prose is so arrestingly beautiful that it moves me to tears. I'm not even saying the writing itself is so remarkable that it moves me to tears. It's just that scene connects all the dots for me. There's hope, fear, righteous anger, looming sacrifice, duty, honor and the call of a home that most had never known.
As I kicked around in my twenties, trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do, writing would flit in and flit out but I never gave it my full focus. I think part of me felt foolish to dare presume that I could write. With the certainty that someone else could write it (whatever I was thinking about) better and my struggles with disordered learning in college, it was never something that I let crack the bubble of possibility.
There is a significant amount of cognitive dissonance that this produces for me because I essentially see the world as a story. Some part of my brain is looking at what's happening around me and ordering it through the lens of a novel. This was why jogging on the streets of New York City after 9:00 pm was so vital and amazing for me in grad school, there was just so much happening at once. Anyway, that dissonance was rooted in literally seeing the world in a certain way, then another part of your brain telling you, "Sorry bud, that's not for you."
It wasn't until I was thirty-three that I started THE UNSEEN. I wrote it during a difficult and nearly overwhelming moment in my life but it was in that place that I allowed myself to throw my self created caution to the wind. Once I let myself believe that I had the right to write (English ftw!) I held myself accountable and just did the damn thing. Of course "doing the damn thing" took far longer than I initially anticipated. If THE UNSEEN ever takes off, I have about 80,000+ words that got cut, so although it's only one finished novel, their world is already much larger.
If I could go back to that twenty something kid, I would tell him that you gotta grind, everyday you have to fight for it. You will fuck up, often repeatedly. Your writing will take you places that don't end up anywhere other then knowing your characters better. Staring at a blinking cursor on an empty page is equal parts terrifying and breathtakingly incredible.
There is no big bow at the end, there is only the journey. The marvelous, awful, beautiful journey.
Have a great weekend friends.