Secret Keys

I used to be a good writer. At least I thought so myself, thank'ee. I was working on a novel almost full time when I had free time between classes. It was mapped out and sequels and their subsequent plotlines were at least floating around in my brain. There were even chapter summaries, 43 in all, which were a paragraph long descriptions of the action, important dialogue, and the twists planned to keep my potential readers turning the pages like so many authors had done to me before.

I wrote the first four chapters in rather short order. I read and re-read them over and over. A friend even offered to proof them as well. In reading them I found that as I mentioned above, I was a good writer. Perhaps I was even the next King or Rowling. But after the first four I became distracted, most likely attributed to being a twenty year old kid who just wanted to hang out with his friends. Having a girlfriend didn't help either. Not that it was a bad thing. It was, still is, a learning experience. You never really know who you are until you have someone who's always there to give feedback and character criticisms, but I digress.

Bored with my progress, I quit writing all together.

A great writer, Robert Jordan (a man who influenced how I wrote at the time), once said during an interview that "ALL writers who are good writers are also good readers. A successful writer like myself becomes so by reading. I'm not talking about a summer book club regimen, but rather thousands. Only then will you become successful." At the time I was discouraged. Here I was trying to find tips and struggling to stay motivated and one of my favorites is saying I can't do it well unless I've read "thousands" of books. I love to read, but "thousands?" Even before I had expressed intrest in writing I read all the time and at best I had only read two hundred.

Discouraged even further, I quit all together. The ideas, as I consider myself a creative genius, continued to build up in my brain. But like Jonesy in "Dreamcatcher" would say, I keep them in a filing cabinet in my brain, locked in a secret room.

Now I am writing a blog and I notice that I do not write quite as good as I used to. I sit in front of my computer and try to regurgitate my ideas, but the story that goes on in my head, vivid as it may be, never comes to fruition when the sysnapses fire and move my fingers along the keys. Hopefully in time it will return. I now realize that like any sport, writing takes practice. A lot of practice. So hopefully, with time, it will come. These ideas are banging to escape. The door to that secret filing room is flexing, but how good of a door can it be if it were to break. It needs a key, a key only I can provide.