Invictus

Where do they find these words? No, where do they find these combinations of words? I never knew “fell” could be used as an adjective, let alone to describe the clutch of circumstance. And yet words are such a small part of mastering writing, and, at the same time, the arbiter between cliché and lyricism. The wrong word will slop out of mouths, slide lifelessly from perched, reluctant lips and painfully stew in the air for all to judge and see — menacing until it overshadows all other words, regardless of their beauty or eloquence, and turns the whole lot of them into a rotting cesspool.

My words slop out of mouths. Just write, just write, just write, they say. Just slop. Just write those sloppy words down and eventually, someday, they’ll become a little less sloppy, we suppose. Even now I can’t stop reading the last sentence and thinking about how I can make it better.
Maybe it’s not in me to write. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes. I wonder how Henley would describe the blank page, in all its invisible, intimidating regalia. I wonder how often Henley went days and months convincing himself every day that “today will be the day,” only to later that night, every night, just give up on writing before even trying and wallow in self-inflicted disappointment. How often did Henley wallow in uncertainty about whether he really ever even wanted to write, and whether it was ever really fun? Probably never.

And it was fun, at one point. What happened? Where did my imagination go and when did I lose it? When did I lose the ability to write something so lame and stupid but still have fun doing it? When did I become so serious that everything I wrote couldn’t live up to my own expectations, doomed to die before it even left my mind?

I remember the stupid story about Donnie, a New-Yorker with a gambling problem who got offed and wound up in Hell, only to survive a menagerie of dangerous situations, like riding a winged beast named Big Bessy, and meet random characters like Gregg Greggson, the dwarfed grim reaper who I admittedly stole from Conker’s Bad Fur Day and, as a result, worried about being sued for copyright infringement when my book got published. That was seventh grade.

So somewhere between seventh grade and 23 years old, I metamorphosed into a stick in the mud, a stick who is presently probably being too hard on himself, because said stick just sat down and just wrote and possibly produced something interesting. Maybe? Please?