I've been dreaming about stories again. The shape of words pressed together getting a rise of emotion of thought and feels. I do so hate to edit, so maybe those words present are not the crispest ever told. But I've been dreaming of them all the same.
I found a person, calls themselves a bard. And hardly it seems could any thing to be so excite me. Should I see stories as I now see music? Something that so excites and delights me that to disengage from them is to leave a part of me to wither, languish, and otherwise despair?
And could it be enough? This watching and listening and consuming of stories. I thought it was enough to take them in from those I admire and let that complete me. But enough perhaps of such beliefs, for we must face the truths we find. I want to spin words again. I want to take a character who I know and let them speak. I want to pick a character I know little of and find them through prose.
The last story that I conjured up nears a finality it's hard to express. It's not a novel to be pinned down. We call it a campaign, but that militaristic word seems wrong. It is a story that will be told once, stretching three years, and only truly shared with me and seven others.
That is part. I don't know if I want to take prose and compress it into paper (or break it into ones and zeros as is the more modern paradigm I follow). I want to tell stories. I want to let my voice ring out and so contribute to the tone of them, colour them in with pause and hush and boom.
Have you considered poetry? It's oft recited, perhaps it is a good place to begin again. To find a place to share a poem or two where I can say them. Yes. Perhaps. Poetry.
More tellingly and pressingly I have no story I wish to tell. There's no tale storming in my brain begging to be let out. That hasn't stopped me before, and perhaps it should not stop me now.
And whose story should I tell anyway? I confess readily that I don't know. I want a story that means. Means to me, and could mean for other people. There's craft, still unlearned.
And should I then presume? And how should I begin?
I love Prufrock for how it twists itself and then unwinds. I once thought it divine, profound. Here is a poem about the uncertainty of every choice we can make, that we may choose not to take up. I could nearly weep at the thought of being a background figure in a world of brighter more beautiful people.
But no. Prufrock's fucking good poetry, but it's not all that. It's just some man psyching himself out from taking the risk of asking someone out. Don't take morals from a man like that.
I must start writing. Stories or words or poetry. I find I want to.
A writer writes
and I am a writer. So what I must do is obvious.