Create

I've been thinking a lot lately about my writing. Or rather, my lack thereof, particularly with regards to my own life. In short, I just never think I'm interesting enough to talk about. I have lots of thoughts on various subjects, but I just let them go. I mean, surely they're nothing no one else has thought of. Why bother writing the words? So I keep things to myself. It always reminds me of those army recruitment commercials they used to run on TV with shots of men and women doing important military-related tasks while the voiceover asks, "if someone wrote a book about your life... would anyone want to read it?" My instinct both now and then is to say "of course not, my life is boring." I assume that's what they expect as well. But I think about the reponses to my old LiveJournal and the immense popularity of Twitter and microblogging and begin to think that isn't the issue.

It occurred to me that it isn't just big events in someone's life that interest people, but rather how people take smaller events. I remember Peter saying once, after I'd written some LJ post about my obsession with fire (haha), that I had a knack for turning the mundane into so much more. Why else would anyone bother following some teenage girl's ramblings? It's fascinating to read about how an individual interprets things, the multitude of ways they digest what happens or could happen to any one of us.

And that's the lure of art, isn't it? What is a painting but an artist's view of the world? What is a song but a musician dissecting life into sound? It doesn't matter if it's exactly the same as what you see or the complete opposite -- the talent an artist wields is simply the ability to capture that.

I've decided that it's one of the worst possible things I could do to simply keep all my thoughts to myself. I consider myself an artist, limited mostly to poetry but I'm certainly proficient with prose. What a selfish thing it truly is to keep silent when I have so much to say. If I crank out some uninteresting posts, so be it. But if just one line I write strikes some sort of chord in anyone who stumbles across my writing, I've done my job as an artist.

Do I not even believe my own ars poetica? The most important thing of all?

"A thought is worth more than the vulgarity of speech;
Embellish it, exaggerate,
and most of all--
create"




PS: please forgive any typos my iPhone has not caught while I've written this -- I have had no sleep tonight and I'm typing without my contacts in