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Storytellers

There are those rare people who can make stories come alive with their voices and bodies. True storytellers are rare – many people know how to tell a joke well, how to tell a funny happenstance or exaggerate something that happened to them. Few are the people who can make up a story on the spot and tell it in a way that makes it seem real and true and exciting.

I don’t know if I’ve met anyone yet who has come close to the way I imagine a perfect storyteller. Perhaps the kind I imagine only exists in books – the bard, traveling from inn to inn, paying for his or her meals with a story, with a tale of valor or wisdom or strife. Perhaps perfect storytellers can only exist when written down in words, when described with such things as “fiery eyes” and “a voice like no other” and “commanded attention without effort, a presence which filled the room easily.”

People don’t sit around fires and tell stories they make up – no, today everything is based on old legends or stories or the Disney versions of those stories, and people discuss politics around the fireplace, and only tell their children stories. Is storytelling a lost art then?

Exhaustion… Taken Over… Brain…

There are those wonderful times when you’re truly too tired to think. Your brain is full of this low, not unpleasant, fuzzy sound. For some reason, as I think of this sound now – it’s creeping up on me even as I write – I imagine that it is the snores of the little mouse that runs all day on it’s little wheel to keep our brains going. Or perhaps it is a hamster. No, mice are cuter than hamsters.

The feeling of being this exhausted, both mentally and physically, is wonderful in my opinion. This feeling holds memories for me, all of them precious: the long drive home from Disneyland that year when there was so much traffic on the way home that I fell asleep and slept through the three hour ride and was carried into my grandparents’ house awake, but pretending to still be asleep because it was so much more comfortable; the memory of every horrid migraine I’ve had and the way I’ve fallen into an exhausted, relieved sleep at the end of the long period of sleeplessness due to the pain; the memories of falling into an exhausted sleep after a particularly enjoyable, but quite long, school trip.

As I’ve confessed, my brain is approaching levels of chronic fuzzyness at the moment, and so I shall have to postpone the writing exercises that I was planning on beginning tonight. Procrastination – it is indeed a devilish instinct, is it not?

Unruly Thoughts

There is a problem I seem to have – while I often know exactly what I want to write about, there are also times when I sit and stare at my computer screen for full minutes at a time, and I ponder. The thoughts run through my head, half finished sentences chasing each other around and around. I abandon one idea and move onto the next, I ditch that one and jump to yet another one. It can be a wonderful feeling, and can sometimes lead to something that I catch hold of and mull over, and that something can eventually blossom into a whole piece.

Then again, there are those evenings where the thoughts never cease to chase each other around, like wild children in a game – each is intent upon making itself heard. But then, as children will do, the ideas abandon their convincing and pleading because something more interesting is going on, or because they’re bored, or perhaps even curious of what the next idea is going to be.

How do writers, real writers that is, deal with this? Once you have a beginning of a story, how do you decide what to do with it? How can a writer, even one with a clear picture of how everything will play out, not be tempted by the dozen odd ideas that can pop into their heads at any moment? I suppose there is some way to focus yourself, but then, perhaps writing at one o’clock in the morning isn’t the time to discover it.

Everpresent

Sometimes I find it amazing that humans have managed to exist as a conscious race at all. Think about it for a moment – we’re each stuck with our own mind and our own emotions all the time. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there isn’t any escape. When we live with other people, we have to “endure” them all the time as well, but we’re only dealing with the outward projection of this person’s thoughts and emotions. Even living with children, who speak out about what they need and want rather more than adults, isn’t the same as how we live with ourselves.

If I sound rather gloomy or negative here, I apologize, for that is not my intention at all. Of course we all have painful moments where we have a difficult time with ourselves and we feel the need to escape from something that we can never escape from. But that’s not what I’m alluding to in this post – I’m mostly thinking about the mundane, everyday thoughts that we deal with. Our minds are always buzzing with thought and emotion, always trying to figure things out, always thinking things we’d rather not think about. We have control over ourselves, but only to a point. How many times have we tried to get rid of a tune or song that’s stuck in our head? We only succeed when we’re truly distracted by something else, outside of us.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it’s incredible so many of us are still sane, stuck with ourselves as are.

Good Impression? Defintely Not.

I am going to share a little story with you. As most of you know, I’m applying to colleges and am currently waiting for answers from most places. One of the places that I applied to was Yale. Yes, it’s definitely one of my reach-schools, and I have no real belief that I’ll get in, but who knows?

I got a call the other day from a woman. She was one of those women who talk through their noses, and Hebrew through the nose is even more annoying than any other language spoken that way. She asked me if I was who I was, I replied that I am, and she then started saying something along the lines of “I understand my boss is supposed to be interviewing you…?” I, of course, replied confusedly that I have no idea who her boss is and I don’t know if he’s supposed to interview me.

Eventually she managed to figure out that her boss was a Yale alumni and that he wants to interview me, as part of the application process. We agreed on a time and date, and eventually hung up, to my ears’ great relief.

The interview is tomorrow, the alumnus is  a lawyer, and I’m already nervous that he’s going to be the biggest prat on the planet – if only because he had his secretary call me [the Brown alum called himself] and didn’t even tell her who I was or what sort of interview we’re supposed to be having. I ask you, is this the sort of impression I’m supposed to have about Yale right from the start? Pompous asses who don’t really care much?

Vampires and Werewolves

There is a fascination that people seem to have with creatures of the night. Look at the amount of novels, movies and TV shows dedicated to vampires and werewolves – the latest Twilight craze being only the most recent and romanticized version of these creatures.

I’ve never been one to really believe in things like this – monsters, ghosts, things that go bump in the night. I’d love it if they could be real, only because having creatures like that around seems to make life very much more interesting, but I’ve always been a “prove it” sort of person. Such is my attitude towards religion as well, but that’s for another post, sometime in the future when I have the nerves for it.

Back to the adoration, or at least fixation, that so many of us seem to have with vampires and werewolves – I wonder where it stems from? Yes, things of danger are always interesting, especially when you’re snug in your bed reading or in a padded chair at a movie theater. But then monsters and hags and ghouls should be dealt with just as often – and yet they’re not. We seem to love the idea of a tortured soul, someone who is human some of the time or still resembles a human in day to day life. Something about the moral questions that arise from a lifestyle that involved killing and maiming seems to be intriguing, something we’d like to delve into – as long as it’s not our own problems of course.

Ah, the musings that surface after watching “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” at midnight…

Empty Gaze

There are those odd times where your gaze gets fixed on something for no reason at all, and you can stare and stare and stare some more and you won’t find any reason to move your eyes away from that object. The object isn’t interesting or special – indeed, it may be just some bump of paint on the wall or a corner of the table or a patch of fur on the floor. There’s really no reason for your eyes to become fixed and obsessed with that certain spot. And yet, you stare at it and feel as if you could keep staring at it for an hour.

This usually seems to happen when you’re tired, or worried, or perhaps just distracted. The thoughts that go through your mind at times like this often don’t make sense – you might be humming a tune in your mind, or maybe you’re mulling over an issue in a circular manner, repeating your thoughts over and over again. Maybe you’re almost not thinking anything at all beyond “Why am I staring at this?” and your mind is oddly blank other than that.

Whatever the reason, this is something that most people get at some point or another. I wonder if our brains sometimes just need a moment to rest, to detach from conciousness, to wander.

Can You Say “Urgh”?

If you can, say it with me, loud and clear. URGH.

My favorite band of all time, AFI, are hosting a contest. And, of course, you’re only eligible to enter and win if you’re a legal US resident. What does my citizenship do for me now, huh? WHAT, I ASK?

Needless to say, I was freaking out over what I was going to post in my video, which is how you enter the contest, and how I was going to dazzle the band with my wit and voice and the weirdness of me living in Israel. And then I thought that I should read the rules of the contest to make sure I could enter. And then, of course, I couldn’t enter.

I’m sorry for the lack of good writing, eloquent descriptions or interesting stories tonight. Migraines and disappointment tend to ruin your creativity a bit.

The Authentic Self Book

I was having trouble with what I should write about tonight. I sat at my computer, with my wonderful-and-still-exciting screen, and I stared and stared and discarded idea after idea. I am ashamed to say, I caved. I opened a new tab, and typed in “writing prompts” in Google. I then chose the first two websites that came up and started browsing the prompts, thinking how fun it would be to write about some of those things. And yet, it felt like cheating. Little did I know that I would still find my subject on one of these websites.

As I looked randomly at the advertisement sitting smugly above the prompts in one of the sites, I found my subject. A giggle escaped my lips, and I proceeded back to WordPress and typed in the title of this post. Yes, the ad was for something called “The Authentic Self Book.” Written underneath the name and the website, it says this: “Are you living an authentic life? Unearth your authentic self. Start journaling your joys, griefs, and all the other life themes in between, and you’ll discover who you really are.” [Random aside – WordPress spellchecker says “journaling” is not a real word.]

I’m all for keeping journals. I’m all for living authentic lives. I’m all for finding out as much as you can about yourself and being honest about your life, your feelings, your virtues and weaknesses. However, and this is a big however, I find it incredibly hard to believe anyone who wants to be so-called authentic would buy a book like this.

Teehee, I love the randomness of the interwebs.

My Goal – To Have Voices In My Head

Writing descriptions is all very well, but no work of fiction is complete without dialogue. It doesn’t have to be incredible, it doesn’t have to be witty, it doesn’t have to be much – except that you have to be able to hear it. You have to able to have two characters, two characters that feel real, and you have to know that when you’re reading, or in my case writing, their conversation, you can actually hear two distinct voices in your head that make sense.

You wouldn’t think that would be such a hard thing to practice. It is though. I’ve realized lately that I love writing descriptions and indeed, I know I write them fairly well, at least well enough. But I don’t know, or rather haven’t attempted to know, how to write dialogue, and that’s bad. I need to learn how. The problem is that I can’t just practice dialogue for the sake of itself. I need to have a situation, characters, voices that I can clearly imagine.

I’m not managing to find a way to practice this. I might be obsessing over something silly, but I truly feel I need to learn to write believable conversations. And for that I’ll need people, stories. So that’s what I’m going to try to work on in the next few days.