Leaving Tracks: Being Heard · 10:42pm Aug 25th, 2022

thedarkprep once said I have a need to be heard when I have problems, and it's always stuck with me. I think it might be among the biggest needs of my life. I need to be heard, which is why I'm writing yet another blog about the same thing the past few blogs have been about.

See, the thing is, I'm a storyteller. When it comes down to it, that's what I am at more core. And of course I'm more than that. I am a pretty damn swell person, in my unbiased opinion. But it needs to be understood that I am not a person who writes stories so much as I am at my core a storyteller. I'm doing it right now. The story I'm telling is true, but I still carefully think about how to best convey my thoughts. What word can I use to really make you feel the weight of the story? How can I make you care about the protagonist? What writer's tools do I use to make this blog post compelling, what details do I shed a light on, which ones do I obscure to make them less noticeable? All of this is conscious thought I'm putting into this blog post because I'm using this as a way to tell my story, because at the end of the day, that's who and what I am.

And like any storyteller, I need to be heard. More than a bit of ego goes into this craft, after all. Few and far between is the author who simply tells stories because they have ideas, few people do this for the love of the craft alone. Sure, the love of the craft is there. I love working with words. I've gotten very good at it, and it feels good to flex those muscles and create something. That, too, is what the point of this blog is about. But mostly, I didn't write this just to write it. I wrote this to be heard, so that someone might come along and perceive my story.

But it's not all about me. Not really. I would, in fact, rather tell you about someone else. Perhaps...

Consuelo Maduro moves into an old house to make her deceased parents proud, but she finds it's haunted. She strikes up an unlikely friendship with a dead woman who makes her feel more alive than she has in all of her life. Meanwhile, Sophia Cross is skeptical of the living woman now inhabiting her house, but she has been cold for so long, and the woman's presence makes her feel warm.

That is, in short, one of the original novels I have going right now. There are three, all at different stages of development. If I could tell you their story, I wouldn't be writing this now. But although I've outlined their story in excruciating detail and know exactly what happens on every step of the way for them, I simply cannot write it. My other original story idea, The Gifted Student (and yes, that name should hold meaning to many of you without me needing to explain more), I can pass off as a struggle for ideas. But this ghost story, it's there. It's there, for 13,752 it's there. The longest, most detailed outline I've ever written. It's longer than some entire stories, and not because the novel is going to be excessively long, but simply because every chapter is planned in more detail than anything I've ever done.

And yet, I am here, telling you this other story about a silly rabbit who can't do the one thing she wants to do. It's not the story I want to tell, and yet, I'm telling it. It's the only story I can manage to tell, and telling stories is the core of who I am.

There are, I regret, a few things I need to say. This is ruining the tone of my story, but this is not going to be perceived as a story. I am, for better or worse, not a character that you can simply sympathize with and move on, but a real person that you may have been following for some time, or you may know me from elsewhere. Many of you are friends, and you will want to comfort me. So it needs to be said that I do not need comfort. I need to break out of my self-indulgent and remorseful monologue about how woe is me, writing is hard, to tell you that I am okay. I need to impress that I have two wonderful girlfriends and a plethora of other friends and family who make sure I am okay. I know writing is hard, I know that without my meds it's harder still, I know that it'll get easier when I get my meds back and for the time being I just need to get through this. I know I am more than a writer, that if I never write again, I still have worth as a person and that people like me and there is much joy to be had in life. It's because of these things that I am ruining this story-blog by turning to the audience and reminding them that I everything will be okay in the end.

Writing that is the equivalent of if I had Sunset Shimmer pull Applejack from the frozen lake, turn to the readers, and remind them that it'll all work out in the end. They're friends eventually, so it's okay if things are hard now. But the one thing that would be worse than ruining my story here is to find that I'm flooded with comments of support. I do not want them, not at the moment. It would miss the point of the whole story, you see.

I do always hate when readers miss the point of a story. It's a bad feeling, so I'm going to do another unheard of thing and tell you the point here. I am a storyteller, and this is the only story I could tell. I did not need to tell this story, I needed to tell a story, and this is the only one I could manage. It's a true story, but it is still, in the end, a story. I have a compulsive need to be heard, especially if the thing that I can say is a story. And that is all this is.

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