The thought of being an author is not so much a glamorous one as it is and bright shiny one. Like when a crow seeing something shiny and it is just lust for it? Like when I go to Aldo and see that pair of Italian leather boots worth more than my ’95 Mercury, I literally lust for them. It’s pure want, I covet those writers who just sit around in their lofts or country cottages and write. All. Day. Long. Would it not be fantastic to have your name on a New York Times bestseller list? To be legitimately published, travel from city to city and country-to-country signing books? But it’s really difficult to actually sit down and not only have the patience and drive to finish an entire book but to also have it be good? No one honestly expects an eighteen year old to write an award-winning novel. The just doesn’t happen. I mean, I have the attention span of a small rodent. To be completely honest I tried writing at least four other ‘books’ before this. And if I didn’t get stuck right about here, not even half a page in, then I got really stuck forty pages in. After countless hours of obsessing and re-reading and brainstorming. I procrastinated by making iTunes playlists. I set dead lines for myself. I told my friends they needed to pressure me into finishing something. But eventually I ideas ran dry. I would get that tight feeling in my abdomen like when you are really anxious for someone to come over so you try reading or scrubbing the stove or pumicing your feet but nothing holds your attention so you just end up thinking in turbo-speed-run-on-sentences, and just sitting on the edge of the couch checking your phone and the front door over and over. You know? It is an awful lot like the feeling I am getting now. Fantastic.
Currently I have laundry to put away, laundry to wash, a bed to make, dishes that need washing. But I’m sitting here, just typing away. The fact that I have gotten this far so smoothly is rather encouraging. When ever I would come up with a ‘story’ to write I would just poke at it. I would poke holes in the plot, the rhythm, the length. Lucky for me, right now I have no plot and my rhythm is one hundred percent stream of consciousness paced. After failed attempts of trying to decide on a topic to write on that I was really passionate about I stated thinking. Well, what do I like to read? Romance novels, cute funny silly books about young women and quirky guys, I don’t want to write that. There are plenty as is. Then I tried focusing on how I write. As many of my English teachers have told me. I write how I speak. I write like a columnist. Not so good for third person, it’s alright for first I suppose. But then I just end up talking like myself. So I may as well just talk as, myself. I heard once, in a great Drew Barrymore movie, that to write well you have to write what you know. So that is exactly what I will do.
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