Beautiful Prison

The rain quietly beats a steady rhythm against the rooftop.  Leaves bend to the pressure of the water, only to release their hold and spring back.  Over and over the process goes.  There are no signs of the rain letting up today.  Just endless hours of watery weather, and nowhere to go.

There was once a time that even a good weather day would see me sit down to a computer and start bleeding out a story.  Rain, sun, snow, it didn’t matter.  There was always some sort of tale waiting just beneath the surface, begging for me to pour it out into the written word.  A truly powerful plot could see me chained to a desk for 8 straight days, hours on end, until the rough draft was one.  One memorable summer, I was kept in line by the keyboard in front of me while I churned out five stories in three months.

Where did that beautiful prison go?

I sit at my computer now, lulled into a sort of trance by the rain continuously falling outside my back door.  It’s also falling outside my front door, and the side of the house, two blocks up the street, a county over.  It’s always raining here.  

Raised as I was in a far more arid climate, even a gentle drizzle feels like a flood might be coming.  My mustang in the back pasture feels the same.  He was from an even more barren place, where water was hard to come by, and any rain came on a knife’s blade, it was either a wonderful blessing or a terrible curse.  Still, the rain can be soothing, but also so very, very distracting.

This is not the first time I’ve sat down to write in the last few years.  I’ve managed about one rough draft a year.  But the process is not what it once was.  Series of stories that were once tripping over the other to be told now sit somewhere in the background.  Characters who once clamored in my ear to tell their side of the plot now sit in the back of a darkened theater, while the world that is my life plays on the silver screen in front of them.

Yet still I sit down, trying doggedly to slow the roll of the story around me, and let one of them at least come forward again.  Flashes are brief, brilliant, and all consuming.  But like a firework, too often gone before I can grasp them.  And so here I sit, again trying to recapture the beauty of a prison that held me in its grasp and wouldn’t let me go.

Days go by, the rain doesn’t cease.  Projects, work, catching up on chores around the house.  Being a full fledged adult takes precedence over everything else.  But weekends, oh weekends, surely there is freedom to be found in them.  

To try and give my creative juices a kick, I do the closest thing to ordering caffeine for my brain that I can.  I start to flip through half finished stories.  Then the finished rough drafts.  Oh, the horror of a rough draft.  It is, all at once, my best friend and worst enemy.  For each rough draft that sits on my shelf proves two things:  that there is still within me the muse to write, and that editing really is the bane to any sane writer’s existence.

Still, something is better than nothing.  And editing does not require the undivided attention of the characters who still sit in the shadows.  It only requires their grudging answers to questions, when a back story wasn’t written down on the first run.  It’s doable.  But being doable and being done are two completely different beasts.

One full edit later, I am left with four chapters completely fixed, and a rough draft again consigned to my project pile.  I never realized before how complicated it was to flesh out characters, especially when they’re not fighting amongst themselves to be heard.  The process is a slow grind, and one that is all too easy to let fall back into the weeds.

The tea pot boils on the stove.  What I really need to get these juices flowing must be true caffeine.  A cup of strong black tea is in order.  I set up my space, clear distractions away, set up the table just so, sip my tea and wait.

Time slips by with the beat of every raindrop.  And I am lost in watching it all happen.  

Is it a time, a place, a state of mind?  Oh where did that prison go, and how do I bring it back?

I content myself with the idea that there are other options to explore creatively.  Scrap books, sewing - curtains, masks, dog beds, doll clothes - but in the back of my mind, even further back than my reticent characters is the voice of reason: I am merely procrastinating.

The tea grows cold.  I absently take a sip, wishing for a fire to be lit that I can only put out by finishing what I start.  I stare at the dark drink, mulling heating it back up or calling it a day.  I tried, didn’t I?  Then it hits me.  Not like a firework, but like a lightning storm.  Tea forgotten, I open up a half finished story and find where I’m missing pieces.  My fingers fly across the keyboard.

Yes! This is what I missed, this heavenly feeling of being at the beck and call of characters of my own imagination.  I need to do this, they are depending on me!  They need to be able to breathe into this real world, if only through the computer and eventually through paper.  Even if only a handful of my closest friends and a few random strangers ever read their tale.  It needs to be told, and the storm that was waiting, has finally burst open.

Outside, the rain is still a gentle reminder that the world does go on around me.  But I have finally found the raging storm that was long held just off the horizon, and oh what a glorious thing it is to behold.  I can’t leave it, not until the winds have howled themselves into a whisper, not until the thunder has rumbled off into silence.

My beautiful prison, how I missed your invisible bars.