drbanality

Sometimes it feels like my education went a little slowly. The feeling comes often when I think I should be a better writer than I am. I read the acknowledgments in every book I finish, because it sometimes tells where the author got their inspiration. Neil Gaiman once got his inspiration from paintings. Terry Pratchett merely has a brief biography in each of his Discworld books, and it's always the same biography, but partly out of habit, partly because I want to remind myself, I read this same biography over and over again. Each time it hits me like it did the first time I read it, and I repeat in my head: this man published his first work when he was 13. I wonder if he was this good.

I don't seek to be like Mr. Pratchett. I don't expect to be in his league, because his league is his own, and nobody stands there. People of style have things like those. They have territories that they purchased with clean inspiration and a handy typewriter or computer. That's why if I stepped there, I could be expected to be shot with his metaphorical shotgun, and maybe shanked a few times for good measure. But it remains intimidating, knowing that people start early like that.

Shirley Temple, the now grown up, somewhat pruning old woman who used to be considered the Dakota Fanning of her day--only younger (age three, I think)--was a talented young actress, and she starred in many films. She got money, having grown up in a family whose jobs couldn't hold a candle to hers. I wonder how that felt to adults like her parents, when they were alive, breathing and either envying or adoring their daughter's successes. Mrs. Temple offered us all advice, though, during her speech for her lifetime achievement award on the Screen Actor's Guild ceremony, and it was that we should all start early if we want to get to where we want. I would love to take that advice, if only I could rewind my life, regain my childhood imagination, when I was curious about everything, eliminate my mild retardation as it was then, and begin anew, reading books and doing what I didn't do back then. I really didn't read books until I was a junior in high school, and that astounds me that I never figured out their meritous perfection until that late in my life, and now I wonder if to fashion an imagination at this age is an exercise in futility.

Writing ability is something everybody could have. Any dope could write. All it takes is a little patience and a basic hold on a particular language to produce a story from within, about things we all know, about things we all experience. And some mistake it for talent. Well, even with that, you can have a talent and not know exactly how to use it.

I didn't begin early, and my imagination has been ground finely into dust, and from dust, it is a little difficult to make that mold of what it once formed. My imagination used to be a tumescent bulge like every young child's, but it diminished over time before I realized it was ever there, before I was smart enough to understand the beauty of holding on to that curiosity. Start early, hah! I began late, and now I'm twenty-one years old, still forming an idea in my brain, and the more it pans out, the more frightened I become of being enthusiastic about it, because as all things go, a great deal of hope and optimism could turn into sourness very quickly. I've come to terms with that on occasion. I think everybody does, sooner or later. Sooner or later.