Chasing the Dream

Working on one of my stories. It’s like revisiting the most magical place on Earth. Is it possible to fall in love with one’s own written work? Every time I go back, I think of new little details and plug them in here and there. Then I go back to the beginning and re-read it. I laugh, maybe cry a little.Then I sit and look out into the distance, daydreaming, only seeing what is in my mind’s eye.

I am bursting with wild ideas, too many really. I tackle one and pin it down, and another one sprints by me. It is like playing tag with a hundred people, and always being “IT”, never able to catch any one of them. I know I need to focus on one, catch it, and commit it to paper, to be fine tuned and fully fledged later.

It’s delightful at the same time it is frustrating; like raising a child and fearing at the same time you fiercely admire and love the wayward being that has a life of its own.

It’s fearful – is my love for this thing as wrong as the first time I fell in love with a bad boy? Will others love it as much as I do? Dare I dream someone would? Does it really matter? Why is the desire to write such a burning thing?

But, first things first! I feel the need to figure out where it is going, how it will finish. For now, I am following a path and I am not in charge of the twists and turns. There is no real way to know yet where it will go. I am running on blind faith. It is pulling me along by its strands, and I am hanging on and weaving them together in its wake.

Is this how it is? Is this what REAL writers feel? How do you stand it? And, when you come up for air, as you simply must do at some point, for your own survival, is it normal to take days, or maybe a week to fully come back to it? Or sometimes, mere hours?

Am I crazy? Don’t answer that! But, is this what it is like for all writers?