There are times when I just get lost.
Lost in a story sitting in my mind, screaming to get out. Fighting for its position at the fore of my brain.
When I played sports, and even more when I coached, I would pre-play the whole game in my mind and for the hour or two before the game was in my own world.
Writing is like that but worse. It’s as if the story says, “Me first.”
I feel it pushing like a child desperate for attention. I sit down at the keyboard and sometimes it spills out, at times horribly so, needing a re-write. Sometimes it goes back to playing peekaboo.
It never really leaves though. It’s there. Music often draws it out. When driving alone with music blasting, or in the shower or on a walk, these magical lines of prose and composition come to me. Only to be recalled occasionally at my desk. Sometimes jumbled up in consciousness.
I must force myself into that same space of being alone to bring forth the words to put to paper.
When it arrives, I cannot tell you where the story comes from, where the river flows. It just takes a journey. At the end of the day, the words may not be as elegant as the best writers of the past and present.
But the story itself feels well-crafted and real.
It’s just that the story keeps invading my time and takes me away from my day job, away from my responsibilities. Away from being in the present and it scares me that I cannot be both here and there and may not get these stories out.