Jun 27, 2009 19:50
I can't write.
I know it's kind of a ridiculous statement if you think about it. But I can't. I want to. I want to be a badass writer who sits in hip breakfast spots with a laptop sipping a cup of coffee and type type typing away at a work of sheer literary genius. Or the girl in the corner of the 24 hour diner with her knees drawn up and her red sneakers on the seat of the booth scribbling in a brown recycled paper notebook, picking at french fries that have long since gone cold while working on the screenplay that will make her famous. More than either of those I want to be me, sitting in my bedroom with my laptop on my lap and my cat curled up on my shins, fingers flying across the keyboard putting all the words and thoughts and images I have strewn about my mind into a story that someone else will be able to read and see if only for a second what goes on behind my eyes when I'm looking at nothing and I'm a million miles away.
But I can't.
What really happens is this: I stare at the cursor blinking on the blank page. I write a sentence. Hit delete. Start again. Maybe ignore my inner censor long enough to get through a paragraph or two. Pause. Read what I've written. Hate every word. Hit delete. Stare and the cursor blinking on the once again blank page and feel like I have failed.
Believe me. I've tried. I want it to work. I have conversations with myself on the way to work in the morning. Conversations with imaginary characters who live and die right there in my mind somewhere between the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru and the Target parking lot. They are good characters, too. With depth and life and a voice all their own. With stories behind them that could make them almost real. The kind of characters I read and want to know. I wish thinking them could make them exist. I wish I could make words appear on a piece of paper just by thinking them. But that wouldn't be writing, now would it? That would be cheating. And we can't have that now can we?
Why can't I ever write anything down the way it sounds in my head?