My wants have always exceeded my needs, just as much as my reach has always exceeded my grasp. That’s the kind of person i am; always looking to the next step rather than delighting in the one i’m on.
I used to boast that i wrote so well because i wrote so much … 3000-5000 words a day. At the time it was entirely true; between blogging, record reviews, academic work, and personal projects i really was generating that much wordage daily, even if a lot of it was getting scrapped. It occasionally lead to a glut on this page, but i always had an easy time saying what i meant in a very assured voice.
Recently i’ve moved so far away from my three-thousand-word habit that when i sit down to write too much comes tumbling out. Each thing i want to say branches into five other things, and suddenly i’m creating more strands that i can plausibly weave together. I feel like the result is unfocused no matter how much i revise it because the intent is corrupt — i wasn’t sure what i wanted to say in the first place, so i never said it the right way in the end.
In a way this speechlessness posing as verbal diarrhea has expanded into my conversational life: i’m majoring in journalism, yet when people ask me what i want to do i hem and haw, eventually saying that i want to be in corporate communications. Do i? Well, maybe. But that’s not what i really want.
What’s completely shocking to me is that i’ve always known what i really want. What’s completely shocking is that it never occurred to me until about an hour ago. Elise went to bed but i wasn’t tired, and i eventually became engrossed in a very comprehensive X-Men FAQ. All throughout the FAQs explanation of dangling plot threads and character origins, i kept thinking Well, that was dumb; they could have accomplished it much easier this way. And, suddenly, there was a click.
Narrating. It’s as dumb and simple as that, and i have too many examples to even invoke here, including my seven-year-old propensity for authoring short stories on a manual typewriter, my oft-revised but never finished teenaged superhero novel, my late-blooming song-writing bent, and my college devotion of blogging. Narrating is what i’ve always wanted to do, but been too afraid to say. From an age as early as eight i secretly wanted to be a novelist, but knew i would be shot down if i ever mentioned such an artistic endeavor in the presence of my family. Ever since i started writing my own songs i’ve wanted to make my habit a professional one, but have lacked the time and the talent to do so.
I don’t have the plots to be a novelist, or the guts to be a singer-songwriter, but i still have my words. I’ve always said i want to appear in Rolling Stone once before i die, and not having accomplished it by the age of twenty-two doesn’t mean i have to submit to a lifetime of trolling my way into the letters column. For each of the endless times that i’m going to be asked what i want to do between now and June, i want to have the nerve to say “write,” and the backup of those three-thousand-words a day. I suppose we’ll just have to see where that takes me.
Shit, was that a resolution?