Coloring Outside of the Lines

Every hour wounds. That’s a weird phrase for a couple of reasons. Well it sure does sound like the kind of phrase that would usually inspire me, for one. It’s succinct and poignant, in an evasive sort of manner. Like you know it means something, but you’re never quite sure if you’re smart enough to know exactly what that something is. You see, I have an embarrassing amount of epiphanies. More, I hope, than the average person. They do stick probably more than I give them credit for, but most of them fall by the wayside. It’s something I’ll have to work on, but it’s not on the list of things holding me back. It allows me to sort of slowly explore other possible avenues of thought and experience, something I’m going to need if I’m to be a writer. I’m going to need my full range of emotions so we’ll be working on that soon as well. To write joy and love, you have to be willing to embrace the two. And really that’s not something I’ve been accustomed to in my writing. I’ve been more of a longing, sad sack pitiable writer. I don’t often write of elation and parties and ponies. I’m not going to write about ponies, we’ll omit that, but the rest of the thing I mean for sure. At least for as long as I mean them. There isn’t exactly a rule book with this kind of thing. I guess you think there is, and you approach the situation acting like every writer you’ve ever read about. The swagger is there, the social outcast mentality starts to surface. You remember that any writer that ever made it big was played up as having come from nowhere, he was the one that everyone had previously ignored. And so you start to feel like you want to hide, when really you should be standing in the spotlight. You can’t force yourself into coming from nowhere, that’s like trying to think up a random number. The writers you’ve read about are the ones that have been sensationalized as celebrities. And really, if you’re any kind of writer at all, you don’t envy them. Sure they had good content and that’s what you want to focus on, but really you don’t go into this wanting to be famous. You go into it with a little bit of a God complex. Again there’s no rule book so this is just my own inspiration at this point. You go into it because you want to create a story that will create a universe, and that universe will attract people as fans. You want the eyes not on you, behind the curtain, but on your work. That’s why there’s no book about it: it would be shining a light on the people who want to control the light as it begins. And I know what I’m about to say, it’s probably what you’re thinking: I’ve already gotten rather horrible off topic. The thing is there’s never been a story anywhere that didn’t benefit from the writer getting a little off topic sometimes. That’s what keeps it from being a textbook, that’s what makes it life. That’s how you put people and characters on a page: you let it be a little messy. All of this to sum up the fact that I have, hopefully, taken the first steps in going back to school and generating a career out of this thing that I spend eight minutes doing on my laptop: writing. I’d love to end this with a smart and intelligent wrap up, that takes everything I’ve talked about and connects the dots and all but I really don’t think I can. Just let it be meta, that’ll work for me.

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