I don't know how much this applies to everyone, but whenever I am particularly struck by a work of art, be it music, a book, a film, a painting, I want to emulate it. I don't want to outright copy the work, or even take little pieces of it and reassemble them into something "new". I want to create something that will strike someone like I was struck. I want to make an impact, to say or do or show something that will make someone stop and think.
I still remember reading The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman for the first time, and how much I loved it. I had always loved reading, mostly Goosebumps books and things of that nature. But The Golden Compass was something different, the way that it resonated with me. I was eleven years old. So I began writing. I never really finished anything I started, being so young, but I remember showing my sister a page or two of something I was calling A Heart Blackened. It was some generic murder story that actually began with the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night..." She read it and told me that it was good. This was all the encouragement I needed, and so I continued. I never finished the story, but I kept writing.
I became sidetracked from writing for a long time once I began playing music, though I did finally manage to finish a story when I was sixteen. I still wrote, but that was mostly in the form of keeping an angst-filled blog. Music had become my passion, and I wanted to affect people the way that the music of others had affected me. I started a novel two months after I turned eighteen, wrote twenty pages of it, then forgot all about it for four years. I recently rediscovered it, thought about the plot again, and decided to start writing it again. Work is slow while I go back and fix the pages I had already written, but it's coming easily again. I don't know if there will be anyone who reads it and connects with it the way that I connected with the work of Philip Pullman, but I don't care so much at this point. I certainly hope it does, but it's not the main motivation behind my writing.
Music is still a major driving force for me, but the other night I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time in years. I saw it through new eyes, appreciating all sorts of new things about it that went by completely unnoticed when I was a teenager watching it. It was somewhere around the time that Bruce Willis was running down Ving Rhames that I decided that I wanted to write a movie. So that's what I'm doing now; Working out a first draft of a screenplay for a Lovecraftian horror film with psychological overtones, tentatively titled The Obelisk. It's an interesting medium to work in, requiring a little less description, more dialogue based. I have been enjoying it quite a bit. I doubt that it will ever be filmed, but I may get enough ambition to one day assemble some actors and some cameras, and put things into motion.
So yes, dear reader, I am still writing. In fact, much more than I have in years. But none of it is ready to see the light of day. When it is, perhaps I'll post some of it.
