An empty mind and a full heart...

How many times have I sat down to write without a single thought of where to start? More times than I can count. But that's not saying a lot, I can't count very high. More times than most people could count, I wager. Yet time after time, day after day, chapter after chapter, I plod through, more instinct than intelligence. More grit than game. Its not an issue of skill, after all, what I lack in potential can't be taught, and what can be taught must be tempered with experience, so all I really can do is keep wading through the ocean of my imagination, paddling out pages as they come to me, and time will tell whether it is all been a waste or not.

That is not to say I start without a plan. I begin with inspiration. A song that resonates with adventure, a phrase that saddens me, a mysterious abandoned bit of rubbish my brain struggles to explain, or more often than not a dream like story which haunts me as I try to sleep. It begins days, weeks, sometimes months or years in the back of my brain, playing like some far-off song in the back of my mind, developing itself and molding itself to my psyche. Getting louder and louder until it cannot be ignored and I am force to summon it into physical world, beginning on the first page.

When I begin, there is a panic. My mind races to fill the void, and I am bombarded with the possibilities of a given story, threatened and enticed by the blank white of fresh paper. Characters and scenery dance around my head, all jostling to be first to the party. And suddenly the drought of words is drowned by the thoughts. 

Rarely is there any order to what my mind asserts first. No grand scheme, or powerful theme. Just a storm of color and emotion in raw form, desperate to be understood but too young to express themselves to me in an understandable way. They coo and cry and puke, pulling my hair and scratching my face while I guess at the best way to write them into the story. And often, I get it wrong. The characters I make don't fit best where I put them. Their personalities wouldn't do what I make them do, and I spend seven or eight rewrites trying to decipher an honest story, when I myself don't know what that looks like.

I write with my heart. Its about as stupid as it sounds, but that is the truth. It leads me down the wrong roads and costs me days of writing time. It would be easier and quicker to plan out a draft and character diagram every person, and map every decision, but whenever I do that I get the story wrong.

My dad is an engineer. He believes in diagraming, in formulas, in templates, and right answers. Every time he sees me he's got a new idea or a new strategy to make me the world's most famous writer. But what he fails to understand no matter how many times I try to explain it to him, is that people aren't machines. We don't act in predictable or simple ways. We are individual, flawed, illogical creatures, who say one thing and do another, believe things and condemn others for the same, and who don't understand the things they do themselves.

That I am that kind of person, and that is the kind of book I'm trying to write. Not a right book, or a good book, or even a popular book, but a person book. A story with its own life, for better or worse, that is truthful and authentic without being right or perfect. I write from the heart because I believe people can feel when something authentic the same why people understand when a musical note is on key or not.

Maybe one day I'll learn how to write with my heart and my head. But since I can only write with one right now, I'm going to write the most emotionally authentic story I can.

Journal:

Social upheaval is the result of two things: The failure of a past generation to foster their own legacy. And the failure of the next generation to accept the condition of the world they were born into.