Once Upon a Time...

The most important word in any writer’s life is the one that is yet unwritten.

Michelangelo once said of his sculpture, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

Like Michelangelo and his marble, in the stacks of notebooks on my desk, in the ink of my pen, in the pixels of my Word doc, there lies something alive that will never be free unless I make it so.

Inspiration is everywhere and materials are cheap, so what is my excuse for leaving creations-to-be in bondage?

That is the whole point of this venture—I want to find a way to channel my creative spirit and share that with those around me so that we can set our own angels free. Then we get to do it over and over again.

This is the important part, the doing-over-again. Whether it be to continue honing a work in progress—such as Margaret Mitchell finally deciding on "Scarlett" as a better name for her protagonist in Gone with the Wind than her intended “Pansy,” or to chase down that next big work whether your current writing has found success or not. What if Charles Dickens had thought, “Hmm…I did a pretty spiffy job with Oliver Twist,” and decided to spend the rest of his life rereading his favorite parts and sipping tea? I would have never known the horror of living through ninth grade English class and suffering through the basketball coach’s reading of Great Expectations. (Not to mention the subsequent joy of rediscovering the book as an adult and realizing that it is quite amazing when not being read aloud by a man tapping a yard stick on the floor while patrolling back and forth in front of my desk.) There would have been no A Christmas Carol and no subsequent Scrooge McDuck.

When it comes to literature, the only enemy is the blank page. For the writer it is the arch nemesis. For the reader, starvation.
 
The purpose of this blog is to battle the blank page with all means necessary, some obvious, some not so much. It exists to encourage creativity surrounding the written word in all its forms, including the creativity of the reader (let’s be honest—nothing written holds significance to anyone unless the reader brings their own creativity and substance to bring it to life), the relentless labors of the writer, the craftsmanship of fine materials (okay, okay—we can call this one a geeky obsession with really cool office supplies), and just about anything else that can somehow be construed to relate to anything literary.
 

This is who I am. My life is made of words and swirls around in their creation and consumption. I know I am not alone in this (or my obsession with really cool office supplies.) So please join me in this wild attempt to grow a community surrounding the unwritten words inside us all.