Breaking Through

This is blog one. I am hoping there will be blogs 2, 3, 4, and 1005 someday, so it's a good place to start. This is a place for me to try to sort out the ideas that come around in my head; for me to get the insignifica out of my way and concentrate on what matters. And that's writing.

It's funny to me to think of writers who didn't intend to start out that way. Writers who had an idea and just lived with it; thought about it and cared for it like it was a child. And then to have it actually work out in the end. To have someone look at that carefully tended thing that wasn't meant for outside eyes, and to say, "That's something to share."

I want to make something to share.

Do I need to think of it more like it was something personal of mine? Some part of me that can live without ever seeing the light of day and that would all right? Because I don't see that way. My writing has never been any more mine than the ideas that came to me. I don't make up things. Whenever I do, they seem small and ugly in comparison to the things I uncover. I see stories like they are truths, previously unexamined and unexplored areas that come to light with the assistance of a knowing guide. I don't write these things. I discover them, and then I show them to everyone. They're not mine to keep, and so it becomes a responsibilty to share them. And that's where the burden comes. They live! They live without me, they existed before me, they'll exist when I'm gone. They want me to tell their story, if I can. But I don't have control over them. I'm just the spectator who stumbled across them one day when I wasn't paying attention. I see them, I write about what I see.

But what happens when I don't see? When the difficulties and stress of the life I only grudgingly live (the monotonous and unforgiving office job, the bills I pay without understanding why) are too much to slough off in pursuit of my escapist land where my characters live? What happens when a wall starts to get built there, and brick by brick, it's more difficult for me to see into their lives and their hearts? What happens when I forget them for awhile? Do they forget me too?

I have a strange land inside my head. That's nothing new. Tolkien did too; a great sweeping middle earth, filled with language and culture and stories, so many of them that you couldn't see every layer if you tried. CS Lewis created a world too. Madeline L'Engle. Piers Anthony. It's their place, it's where they live when they're happy. I have that place too. But what if I can't always get in? What if the wardrobe doesn't always open for me? What then?

What then for me?