I always wanted to write. I’ve never been actually good at it, but I always wanted to write.
When I was a kid, I would write short stories for school. But when one of my classmates wrote an enthralling story about the Second World War I wanted to be part of the process and I tried to continue what he wrote. And it was bad. And it’s not the adult in me saying it now. I knew THEN it was bad.
Today I found this:
Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
From here, via this BBC article about the best books of 2021 until now (April).
And I’m thinking one of the (many) issues I can’t write as good as I’d like is that I’m too much in my head. I process my thoughts and feelings in my head and when I express them they’re (most of the time) fully formed. And trying to write how i got to the final idea feels futile and inconsequential.
Oh, well…
