Remembering Where You Put The Stories

I used to be the kind of writer, who was really, annoying to any other writer around me. They’d ask how I came up with lines, why I chose the words I did. How’d you come up with that idea? Where do you find your inspiration? My answer would be “It’s just there.” I never felt like I made stories up, so much as they came to me, or I tripped over them and ever so elegantly face planted right into the middle of what would become my idea of the perfect story.

Looking back, at every one of those stories, there is the smallest fragment, like a shard of glass, which comes directly from my personal life. I think most writers will tell you the same thing, we bleed a little of ourselves into each creation.

It’s those little shards that the stories grew from; shattering into a thousand little sparkling pieces of reflection.   

I’m a fairly, private person. I don’t wear my life on my sleeve, or tell it to strangers in the street. Well, not in the way the crying girl at the supermarket will. However, the last two years have been filled with events leaving me pushing myself away from those fragments those personal moments. So I still had, the skills I’d learned, and the craft, voice and style that I’d developed over the years, but the stories were gone.

Slowly, painfully, they’re starting to come back. They are starting to grow again. I’ll walk by a conversation in the store, and there will be a story in the one overheard moment between arguing couples.

The stories never left, they’ve been there, waiting for me to be ready to start telling them again, to start listening again.

So my take on writers block, has a lot to do with the way we live our lives. How much time is spent doing what you “dreamed” about when you were a kid, with all these marvelous ways to communicate with one another, we’ve gotten lost in a sea of other peoples stories, and distanced ourselves, for personal reasons, and for other reasons from the things we know.

For now, for me at least, it’s going to come down to write what you know.

I’ve dusted off the journals, and dug through the notebooks, to find some of those long forgotten fragments and shards of me.