I’m a hopeless romantic. I don't mean that in the strict original sense that echoes the works of such poets as Williams Wordsworth or John Keats; neither is it the case that I spend my rainy Saturday afternoons watching vapid rom-coms or melodramatic period pieces. I am romantic in the sense that I am an idealist. I believe that stories have the power to transform lives, and to elevate our hopeless species to a higher level. Yeah, you can throw stones at my school of humanities all you want but it doesn't change the fact that us snobs live in a heightened realm of enlightenment. All kidding aside, I'm only in this school because I love media in all its forms and more than that, I love fiction. My dream is to make stories so great, I'd be raking in the dough like J.K. Rowling—she no doubt be rolling in the moneyz.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me—and if it isn’t—then if everybody else just doesn’t say. Surely I’m not the only one who’s writing a story in his head, chock full of characters, settings, and situations that we hope to realize in one way or another, either just for the fun of it or—more practically, just because we hope to gain some measure of success for it. Perhaps this is really borne out of my lack of active socialization, since I don’t have to worry about “reality” or the people in it; I would rather concoct these little stories then worry about having fun. Not to misrepresent myself as some recluse living underneath a rock or anything, but there is a reason why people love to read books and watch movies after all—I just want to be a part of that.
But such dreams are the domain of the flighty underachievers who spend their lives daydreaming of a day that never comes if you don’t actually put it down. But I wonder how many people actually consider writing stories of their own, whether it be reflections of their own life, hopes for the future, or just plain fiction. The hardest part of writing any story is, of course, trying to transpose the awesome idea in your head to a piece of paper. When it comes out less than you expected, you can only throw your head back and wail because you're obviously not talented enough to spill out your creativity in a competent and organized manner.
But I only speak for myself. Is the realm of ideals unique only for me? Surely there are those of you out there, with ideas bouncing around in your head, who would like to shed yourself of the creative burden—only you can't, because you're not capable. Am I really the only guy that walks around the world actively writing stories in my brain? I can't be the only one. But even if that’s not the case, the difficulty of realizing ideas, not entirely restricted to the realm of fiction, should be an obstacle familiar to everybody. The endless struggle to realize the picture in our head onto the canvas of reality is what life is all about after all. One has to wonder what the world has missed out on, from all the untold stories of this world, true or made up, that never got a chance to be read, seen, or heard simply because we are unable to pull it from the recesses of our mental landscape. I once thought about a machine that, if hooked up to a person, would display exactly what they would be thinking, allowing that person to make his own movies without having to lift a single finger. Sadly, such machines don’t exist, and we have to make it up the hard way, with actual down and out hard work, and in my case, writing.
If I go to my grave without writing a single work, I could probably find peace with the fact that I may very well be among the millions of authors—past, present, and future—of the greatest story—never told. And you know what? That’s just fine with me.
