In and Out

I started writing a short story the other day. The usual trick - got to a certain spot and then stopped. I usually start writing from a scenario that paints itself into my head. The scenarios, though, are not joining themselves together with other scenarios, making something bigger than themselves. They just sit there, like scenes, in a small pocket world of their own, five second flickers that don't end up containing life to breathe in and out and make more of themselves.

I have fully formed pictures appear in my head sometimes. Two nights ago it was an image, in oranges and reds and blacks, of two sparsely drawn people walking past me on my right and then out of vision behind me. I do not know what it was. It lasted for a flinching second and it made me physically jolt, there on my bed. I do not know what it was.

There are many steps to go to finish a story. I will, again, one day. It's trusting that there are things I need to learn, or relearn, to unblock the blockage. The best sorts of learnings happen without words. This is one of them, when I'm not even sure that I'm learning anything at all.

When I woke up this morning, the flywire screen had been removed from the window in the middle of the night. I was sure it wasn't like that when I got home last night. Someone must have tried to break in, in the night, while I was asleep. It made me happy seeing that flywire screen sitting there like that because it proved that when people try to break into my house, they can't.

I watched a movie this evening and was struck anew by the special art of the screenwriter. They write bubbles, it seems to me. A special kind of art that writes spaces and nuances for other people to fill. I think that screenwriters must be especially giving and generous sorts of people, loving gods of their domains. The best kinds of bubbles are the ones that stretch away for miles, so that you have to put them aside to take out later to reexamine them again.

Often I say or write things, and I am doing them on the fly. It's not that I'm making it up as I go. I already know everything that I am saying. It is coming from a deep well of knowing and intuition, but I haven't put words to it yet, and so I don't really quite know it in this particular way until ooh, look, there it is before me. I knew all of this, and yet I have also learnt something new. Sometimes, when I am putting my own ego aside and swimming in the stream, the words come flowing out my mouth like water from that stream, and what I really feel like is that art is coming out of my mouth.

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Which is pretty funny when you consider how potty-mouthed I am. One of life's little quirks, I guess ;)