What The Hell Am I Going To Write?

https://www.theprose.com/post/621507/analytics

This post represents a lot for me. Though it isn’t my favorite piece, not by a long shot, I can’t help but feel a small sense of pride whenever I read it. Before finding my way to The Prose, I wrote, but I wrote without direction and without any idea of what the end goal was to be, or what it ought to be. I simply wrote for the mental and phalanges exercises.

This amassed thousands, if not, hundreds of thousands of words of prose that went entirely nowhere, except the basement in old folders, collecting dust. This took place over the better part of a decade, if not longer. I simply couldn’t figure out what I was trying to do or what I was trying to say. Or if I had anything to say at all.

I’m also a musician (well a four chord superstar), and back when I was 20 or so, a buddy and I decided to form a band. I’d write the songs, and music, and he’d sing them. He had a great voice, I did not. He wasn’t much of a writer, maybe I wasn’t either, but nevertheless I took the reins.

I’ll never forget the first evening we got together at my apartment. My coffee table was filled with beer and liquor and we had a turntable, with a massive collection of records to help motivate and inspire us.

As I placed the guitar on my lap, and then the notepad next to the beer, both of us had a strange moment, where we looked at each, kind of laughed, and I said “What in the hell are we going to write?”

We had all of these ideas. All of these influences in different genres, and when it came time to compose something of our own, we just blanked.

This reminded me a lot of my writing years later, when I decided I wanted to be an author.

As someone who reads every single day of their lives with no real rhyme or reason to the stories that they digest, I couldn’t help thinking the same thing I thought all of those years ago as a university student with a belly full of beer. “What the hell am I going to write?”

And this website, like a literary epiphany, appeared and allowed me to focus my multitudes of straggler ideas into some form of coherence. It allowed me to look at the challenges, and tell myself that I had to write a story that fell within the guidelines of the prompts.

So again, I digress. This isn’t my favorite piece, but it’s instrumental and symbolic to where I am today. That story led to dozens more, and since then I've received an offer to publish a short story collection, with several of them coming from the great challenges I’ve entered on this site.

This community is so important for writers who are looking for a place to untangle the mess in their heads, and allow others to experience these stories without malice, or judgment sans constructivism.

I often think of art and the hidden and often lost talents of those who create but never hit submit. I hope for them that they find this place, and let us see their undiscovered talent. Because boy, is there ever a lot of talent here.