live and learn...

...and then re-write your story.

So for those of you who don't know I want to write. I can go on and on about the power of literature and how it changed my life and how I can't wait to be behind the podium teaching it but the truth is, I don't have the balls to go all Stephen King, take a shit job, and write Carrie during my fifteen-minute breaks. I need something with a little more security (read health care and enough money to keep me swimming in Gap's latest line of argyle sweaters) than that.

I do, however, write. I journal, I have several short stories in notes and in my head, I blog. Most importantly, though, I keep stories in my head. I think about how stories are constructed. I dissect the plot lines of shows like Weeds and The OC. Every time I talk to my brother I get some new idea for how I would (will) portray him in my book. The mental process doesn't often stop. So when really good things pop into my head I have to write about them.

Last night my brother and I did a long, drawn-out face regime involving no less than six products and and a power tool (bathroom variety, dahling). The end of the regime started with a flirtation with a bronzer that injects Vitamin C into your face from the first dusting to the next time you plug in the Clarisonic scrubber. According to my brother we looked catalog perfect. My brother neglected to tell me, however, that the bronzer transfers to fabric easily and hence my new, white, zip-up hoodie was a bad choice. The hoodie spent the last twenty-four hours soaking in a sink of cold water.

A few minutes ago I decided the hoodie had suffered long enough so I started wringing it out. Word to the wise: a fully-saturated white, zip-up hoodie weighs more than you would think. It was so heavy, in fact, that I announced it to my brother. The conversation went something like this:

Jon, this is heavy.
Oh yeah?
No wonder people drown! ... You know, I wrote about this in an award winning story once. The lead character rescued a woman on the Titanic because she couldn't swim under the weight of her dress. When faced with the real thing, though, I am beginning to doubt that my pre-pubescent lead character could have done any better than the woman wearing the dress.
Award-winning story, huh?

The point wasn't that the story was juvenile and mostly shit (just slightly less shitty than all of the others) or that one shouldn't wear white while applying vitamin bronzers but rather that writing is a never-ending process. I wrote that story when I was in seventh grade. I wrote it on a whim and didn't expect to either submit it or win anything. When I lifted that (excruciatingly heavy) hoodie out of the sink my mind went immediately back to that scene when the lead character, in a daze after watching his grandmother die, wades into the water spilling into the D-Deck reception area, finds, and saves a young woman who was about to succumb to the weight of her saturated dress.

And this is why I need to write--because I can't stop thinking in stories.