I was walking through town one winter day with my wife and we walked by this beautiful field of unmarked fresh fluffy snow. She just had to walk in it. We both agreed that it was beautiful in it's virginity but she just needed to walk in it to leave her mark. One day many years later I got a hard bound book with nothing but blank white pages in it. It was about 800 pages long though I didn't count them and like I said, they were blank so there were no number on them. I'm guesstimating. I remember opening up that book and having this urge to write something. Anything. There I was with all this powdery white space and I needed to leave my mark. It is so much easier to walk in the snow.
I think this also speaks to the popularity of sites like Facebook and Myspace. It is an opportunity to make your mark.
Why do people write? I think to a partial extent it's to express themselves to themselves, like in a diary, but I really think that the larger portion of the motivation to write is because you want other people to read it. That isn't to say that we want people to read the words that we are writing at this moment, but that we think that at some point we will write something worth passing on. We maybe hope that we will be one of the monkey's that accidentally bangs out Shakespeare's sonnets or something. I like to think I have a great novel in me somewhere but I just can't get it to form any sort of plot line. And as hard as it is to get just one going I can't imagine how hard it would be to have to write a series of stories.
I think I might have the same problem that so many people have, and that is the tendency to edit as I write. I have a sci-fi story in my head, but I just don't think it will be good enough. It just feels so derivative. I feel like I have already seen so many of those stories. Plus, I have a few of the characters and the location and mood in mind, but the overall story eludes. (Wow, that's my one page already.)
I think this also speaks to the popularity of sites like Facebook and Myspace. It is an opportunity to make your mark.
Why do people write? I think to a partial extent it's to express themselves to themselves, like in a diary, but I really think that the larger portion of the motivation to write is because you want other people to read it. That isn't to say that we want people to read the words that we are writing at this moment, but that we think that at some point we will write something worth passing on. We maybe hope that we will be one of the monkey's that accidentally bangs out Shakespeare's sonnets or something. I like to think I have a great novel in me somewhere but I just can't get it to form any sort of plot line. And as hard as it is to get just one going I can't imagine how hard it would be to have to write a series of stories.
I think I might have the same problem that so many people have, and that is the tendency to edit as I write. I have a sci-fi story in my head, but I just don't think it will be good enough. It just feels so derivative. I feel like I have already seen so many of those stories. Plus, I have a few of the characters and the location and mood in mind, but the overall story eludes. (Wow, that's my one page already.)
