Learning to Listen to a Dream
When I was ten years old I asked my mother if I could borrow her old manual typewriter. I had an idea. I had inspiration.
I wanted to write a story.
I don't know where the inspiration came from, I just felt it. Something inside me, that I can't really articulate to this day, was churning. I felt that I was swimming in my imagination and acting on impulse, an impulse that came from my heart. My heart was talking to my head and my head was telling me to write.
So, I lugged the typewriter up to my bedroom, no easy task for my small, skinny, awkward frame at the time and plopped it onto the small wooden desk I had, sat down, put a couple of pencils and typewriter erasers next to it and began clacking away.
For hours, the click clack of the typewriter echoed through my bedroom. I had to be called to dinner three times, each time my mother's voice becoming increasingly impatient and irritable eventually giving up in exasperation. But I was on a roll, I couldn't stop, the words were flowing from me, the images of what I wanted to write scrolling before me as if I was watching a movie. I was lost in the vision of it.
And I couldn't even type back then. I was laboriously pecking away, my fingers tired and complaining, my brain feverishly searching for every right word, my eyes burning from staring at the paper but, I didn't care. I guess you might say it was... well slightly obsessive.
Much to my dismay, when I was finished, after reading through what I had written, I found many errors and the typewriter eraser also got a good workout that evening. I was also dismayed to find that my story was very short, a few pages. My mind couldn't comprehend that after all that labor, after all the visions I had had, that the end product was so... meager.
But the dismay was small, nothing compared to the pride I felt at writing my very first story, albeit a simple story resembling a Friday the 13th/Jason/killer goes on the rampage knockoff. I even added a detective to the mix, hot on the trail of our devious, insidious stalker of small children.
When I was satisfied with it, I ran downstairs, papers clutched in my hands, my dinner near absolute zero at that point and showed it to my parents. With strained patience (dinner was still on their minds) they read through it and complimented me... then promptly made me eat.
But it was then that I was hooked. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew it without a shadow of doubt that I wanted to be a writer. I wrote many more stories as time went on, an old cardboard box housing them, its cover soon split from jamming as much as I could into it.
In high school, I was terrible at every single math class I was forced to endure. I excelled in my English classes and loved all the books on their reading list: Wuthering Heights, The Good Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, A Tale of Two Cities, and many more.
In college, I took every writing class the university had to offer and was disappointed when there were no more to be had.
But it was also in college that I was diverted, convinced by outside forces that I would never make any money, never have a successful career, never be able to "get anywhere" if I continued with my desire, that my direction was folly and that it would be better to pursue a major and career path that would allow me a job prospect upon graduation.
Sadly I listened to them, to the forces acting upon me from people who had my best in mind but, couldn't share my heart.
So, for years following graduation from college I struggled to be what they thought I should be, to be what they wanted me to be... and I was never happy. I was never satisfied, fulfilled, always restless, looking for something more.
It was only after I fought in Iraq, upon coming home from war with a uniquely fresh insight into life and how short, how fleeting, how precarious it is balanced with death and upon death how many dreams have yet to be realized by those who die, that things changed. It was the war, and facing the prospect of my own death on a daily basis, that reminded me to live, to truly live each day and to chase down my dreams because if not now, when? And life will be over before I realize it.
And so, today I write. I write because it is what I've always loved and always wanted to do deep in my heart. Writing may never "get me anywhere" in terms of material wealth or monetary gain but, when my time ultimately comes, I know that I will be able to say to myself not that I should have but, that I did.
I can live with that.
Goodnight world.
I wanted to write a story.
I don't know where the inspiration came from, I just felt it. Something inside me, that I can't really articulate to this day, was churning. I felt that I was swimming in my imagination and acting on impulse, an impulse that came from my heart. My heart was talking to my head and my head was telling me to write.
So, I lugged the typewriter up to my bedroom, no easy task for my small, skinny, awkward frame at the time and plopped it onto the small wooden desk I had, sat down, put a couple of pencils and typewriter erasers next to it and began clacking away.
For hours, the click clack of the typewriter echoed through my bedroom. I had to be called to dinner three times, each time my mother's voice becoming increasingly impatient and irritable eventually giving up in exasperation. But I was on a roll, I couldn't stop, the words were flowing from me, the images of what I wanted to write scrolling before me as if I was watching a movie. I was lost in the vision of it.
And I couldn't even type back then. I was laboriously pecking away, my fingers tired and complaining, my brain feverishly searching for every right word, my eyes burning from staring at the paper but, I didn't care. I guess you might say it was... well slightly obsessive.
Much to my dismay, when I was finished, after reading through what I had written, I found many errors and the typewriter eraser also got a good workout that evening. I was also dismayed to find that my story was very short, a few pages. My mind couldn't comprehend that after all that labor, after all the visions I had had, that the end product was so... meager.
But the dismay was small, nothing compared to the pride I felt at writing my very first story, albeit a simple story resembling a Friday the 13th/Jason/killer goes on the rampage knockoff. I even added a detective to the mix, hot on the trail of our devious, insidious stalker of small children.
When I was satisfied with it, I ran downstairs, papers clutched in my hands, my dinner near absolute zero at that point and showed it to my parents. With strained patience (dinner was still on their minds) they read through it and complimented me... then promptly made me eat.
But it was then that I was hooked. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew it without a shadow of doubt that I wanted to be a writer. I wrote many more stories as time went on, an old cardboard box housing them, its cover soon split from jamming as much as I could into it.
In high school, I was terrible at every single math class I was forced to endure. I excelled in my English classes and loved all the books on their reading list: Wuthering Heights, The Good Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, A Tale of Two Cities, and many more.
In college, I took every writing class the university had to offer and was disappointed when there were no more to be had.
But it was also in college that I was diverted, convinced by outside forces that I would never make any money, never have a successful career, never be able to "get anywhere" if I continued with my desire, that my direction was folly and that it would be better to pursue a major and career path that would allow me a job prospect upon graduation.
Sadly I listened to them, to the forces acting upon me from people who had my best in mind but, couldn't share my heart.
So, for years following graduation from college I struggled to be what they thought I should be, to be what they wanted me to be... and I was never happy. I was never satisfied, fulfilled, always restless, looking for something more.
It was only after I fought in Iraq, upon coming home from war with a uniquely fresh insight into life and how short, how fleeting, how precarious it is balanced with death and upon death how many dreams have yet to be realized by those who die, that things changed. It was the war, and facing the prospect of my own death on a daily basis, that reminded me to live, to truly live each day and to chase down my dreams because if not now, when? And life will be over before I realize it.
And so, today I write. I write because it is what I've always loved and always wanted to do deep in my heart. Writing may never "get me anywhere" in terms of material wealth or monetary gain but, when my time ultimately comes, I know that I will be able to say to myself not that I should have but, that I did.
I can live with that.
Goodnight world.
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