That Fictitious Nonsense

I have long ago, convinced myself that I will write a novel – a great one, something that would change the world… I was born with a talent with words, I never really honed it much – except that I was blessed with the love of reading. And without knowing it, my vocabulary grew, my sentences matured, my paragraphs bloomed – and before I knew it, I became a writer.

It has always perturbed me why I still haven’t written a novel. I have published many short stories, most of which was well-received by my colleagues – but these were few and far between. Yes, I used to write well. Now, I don’t know.

Each time I begin writing a piece of fiction, I always stop at the first chapter… or sometimes even the first page. And then, writer’s block would just course through me – halting everything else. Each time I write something bad, I delete the entire chapter, hating it and throwing it into the garbage can beside my computer. Then I do the process again,and again, until my garbage can has no more space for crumpled papers.

Sometime after a few failed attempts, I stopped writing altogether.

I began to watch movies, trying to find that one single movie that would motivate me to write again. If someone came to my room, the first thing they’ll see is the astounding amount of VCDs and DVDs littered everywhere. I have amassed quite a collection, and drilled a giga sized hole in my finances because of them. But still, the motivation never came.

I played video games and hosted pen and paper rpgs in an attempt to organize my ideas into something concrete, and while many of my players loved these games – I still wasn’t able to write them down into paper.

I’ve read novels, from classics by Mark Twain, Louisa Alcott and Alexandre Dumas, to contemporary authors like Neil Gaiman, Isabel Allende, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R Tolkien. I’ve even read fantasists like David Gemmel, R.A. Salvatore and Raymond Feist – still to no avail. I’ve amassed quite a collection of comics and graphic novels as well, from the award winning Fables and Sandman – to the X-men and Spiderman.

I went home one night, and it dawned to me just how huge my collection was. And I wondered why I read and watched so much…

Then, it struck me.

I was looking for a good story. That much I knew.

I was looking for a story I liked. None of the other novels nor the movies gave it to me, and I felt… incomplete until that story was written and put into the shelves. That was why I wanted to write in the first place. I can’t find that story from other authors’ pages… because they have a different vision than I do.

Unfortunately, I still don’t know what is this great story I really want… In that one huge pile of fiction in my room – those hundreds of DVDs, books, games and comics – I liked some things and I hated the others. Now, this blog is dedicated to scrounging that pile and putting things into place. Finding out what I liked about each of them could help in decoding what I really want. Finding that one thing that makes sense to me amidst that unholy pile of fictitious nonsense.