A Splash of this and that

 -in paint

Competitions – love ’em or hate ’em, they exist in a writers life because they help get the ‘name’ visible (and a valuable cash source to pay for paper and ink and stuff). So I enter competitions. Not too many – two, sometimes three each year.

It’s been a long time since anything happened, and I’ve since learned more of the craft of how to put it together in a short (a ‘for me’ short, not one of those 32 word shorts – for me, if it’s less than 5k words, it’s very short!).

And the last attempt – a non-POV story of the creation of a picture, a painting with colours to the accompaniment of music and noise and movement and sounds and tones and hues and . . .

Didn’t work. Too hard to keep up the passion and play for more than a thousand words. Loved it though, but won’t put it up for critique.

Why?

It’s so personal. I thought it had no POV, but I was wrong. It’s all me. Too much me. Too internal and revealing. Even without a POV character, it’s a piece that speaks volumes about the person wielding the brush, the baton, the dance. And the pen (figurative pen, of course).

My eyes don’t see colours the same way yours do, my ears don’t hear the same tones yours do. Colour-blindness and tone-deafness would defeat any attempt I made at any creation using colour or sound. But in words! Oh, the passion I felt. The exhilaration and freedom and sheer – I don’t know what it was, but it was powerful, so powerful, so organic, so alive – that I had to put it down.

I wrote another story, a piece that was close to my heart and my story, but it seems lacklustre by comparison. Dry. A desert of the soul crying out for a touch of that madness that came from creating a painting in words.

That’s what I tried to do. I’m so sick of hearing ‘a picture paints a thousand words’ that I decided to do it the other way around: ‘a thousand words to paint a picture’. Now I know why people don’t do it. It takes a piece of your soul and shows you what happens when it is bared to creation.

I love it. I can’t bear it. I can’t bare it to you. It’s mine. A little piece of my soul and my creative spirit that can’t be shared, can’t be acknowledged by others. It belongs only to me – but maybe I’ll read it aloud to the dog, and see what she thinks!