Pages, Chapters & Acts: Oh My!
For over a decade I’ve had two literary demons haunting me. One, a cursor blinking on my screen, taunting me to move it ever so slightly to the right, and degrading me at every hesitation, and hypnotizing me with it’s growing confidence of my inability to do so. The other, tempting me with the sadistic satisfaction of removing from existence every single word and sentence that I had piously deemed worthy of moving my fingers for in the first place.
To my knowledge, there’s no way to make the blinking stop, but I have pried the Backspace key off many a keyboard… but it’s never worked. Instead, I just found myself searching for something to jam into the empty socket to make the words disappear. There’s an almost Zen-like calm with that kind of power. It’s just easier to walk away from nothing than to save something that you’re so ashamed to admit is yours.
When I first got serious into writing, I was living off a bit of money, and trying to build my legacy. I was more interested in my future biography than the works that would warrant writing it. Since I didn’t have a job, I would wake up and black out all my windows with sheets and towels, then sit on my couch and write for hours on end. I had several stories, including a pre-planned trilogy, and decided that it would be more impressive if I wrote them all at once. So, I worked on a bit of each; putting down over ten thousand words every single day. But, while I did produce a lot of storytelling, none of it was very good. These days I try to argue that at least I was learning something; finding my voice and building a habit. But in reality my mind was always pulled back from the stories, and more focused on the act of writing. I was more interested in how many pages I’d have at the end of the session than the quality of the content.
I’ve saved most of what came of those days. And, I am pleased to find some decent bits hidden within all the junk, so maybe it was all worth it… But for some reason my passion faded. I don’t remember the exact moment that I walked away, but as my bank account dried up, I found an excuse to move on.
It’d be really convenient to blame having to split my priorities for a lapse which would grow into a monster spanning nearly a decade, but I think it was honestly more about distractions and excuses. In all those master sessions I’d never produced anything that I was particularly proud of. At the time, I shrugged it off as the learning curve. Inexperience. I still had to find my voice. But I think, looking back, that I was probably experiencing the first pangs of fear that just because I could write well, and had plenty of interesting stories and ideas, that it was going to be a hell of a lot more difficult turning them into works of literature worth reading. My bubble of arrogance was being approached by a very sharp pin, so I turned my attention elsewhere. I dove into my job responsibilities and tried to find hobbies that took up time after work. Anything to give me an excuse to avoid sitting down and making that cursor move to the right.
I quickly moved from trying to find my voice to trying to find myself. I jumped from (and to be honest, still do) one extreme to another. I went from obsessing over the best car with the best stereo, the best tv and the largest dvd collection, to selling it all and living in a 16×8 foot efficiency apartment, sleeping on a roll up mat, and owning just a laptop and portable dvd player. I met new people, dropped one obsession and moved onto the next, moved around, and soon each new opportunity began to crumble a bit more, and the fantasy wall that I had put up between acquiring a regular life, and the necessity of my writing, began to weaken. I became depressed, and rode that wave for a while.
But, even though I’ve not put a meaningful word on paper in nearly a decade, I’ve never really stopped writing. Every idea I had back then has continued on marching along in my mind; evolving, growing, aging, dying. Some put to rest as I matured, some pulled aside and euthanized because I missed the moment. Some which at one time may have been prophetic, yet now would be cliché, old, and tired.
But every few years I do what I am doing now. I try to pin my humility to my chest, draw a line in the sand, and make bold proclamations about what is in store for me tomorrow. I’ve rebooted my mind a dozen times, hoping that with each that I’ll be motivated to start a new chapter in life, starting with one that might lead to my first book; one that within a year or two will finally redeem my thus-far wasted time on this planet.
This is another one of those times. But I am frightened that each line I draw lies further away from where I stand; willing to be bold and leap forward and shout, then find myself cowering into the shadows until I manage to find the will to try again and follow through with another step forward.
There’s only one thing working in my favor this time: My compulsive nature. The largest monster in my path might ultimately become my greatest motivator.
I am turning 29 in a month, and I fear that if I fail to turn my life around, and begin writing the words that create the paragraphs, which fill the pages and construct the chapters, which grow into the Acts that finally birth the books that my infected mind require; then I will fall into another wasted decade; one filled with further depression, regret, and, ultimately, a mental surrender that will remove all hope from my heart that I will ever again have such an opportunity as is now currently standing before me.
And, with that, all I can say is: See you on the next page.
- Joshua Frank Bartalomy / June 10, 2010
