It's Pretty Interesting When...

…when  you finally begin to see a story in everything around you. With my sights set on becoming a writer, I figured that was something of a pre-requiset.

I figured wrong.

As a poet by nature (sort of) and formal training, I'm much better at making observations, not plot lines…which in the end, could explain why I write really shitty poetry.

Just recently, I made the discovery that in order to have a good story, you have to start with an observation. Just as in poetry, you can't stop after a single observation and make the reader guess what the significance of it is…you have to craft a never ending story, yet fold it--an entire insight--about love, loss, happiness, hopelessness, existence, desperation, exaltation, and the human condition into a concise little package about a mending wall or plums in the icebox.

The same goes for storytelling: You have to begin with that same little observation that can be as dumb or insignificant as the way a song on the radio makes you feel…except you have to draw it out over pages and pages, finding intricate, little details, and points of physical comedy, and fodder for engaging dialogue that are nothing but fun, yet all relevant to how whenever you hear "You're all I've ever wanted dear / I could utter every word you'd ever hope to hear / I shudder when I think that I might not be here forever," you think back to how much fun it was to make a Jenga-style tower of notebooks, coffee mugs, staplers, and cell phones on your boyfriend's back while he lay passed out on the couch after mistakenly taking 2 of your Advil PMs, thinking they were just Advil, while The Airborne Toxic Event played in the background and you rapidly came to be called the "Mead Way Roofier" by your smart-ass housemates.

…and how now you miss the way that feels when the only thing you have to stack are empty water bottles, Coke cans, wrappers and wadded up paper that liter your desk and surrounding landscape as you cut yourself off to the world while trying to finally write something worth the time of day.

That comical-yet-heavy little observation about the antics of 20-somethings in love, their tortured artist souls aching for the next great American novel?
The next "haha-but-seriously-the-ending-will-make-you-feel-shit" rom-com/dramedy to hit big screens.
That is, if it's written right: hence the heaps of trash, late nights, desperate and self-depricating blog posts, and the occasional margarita in a can.