The words in my head

One thing I learned a very long time ago is the words in my head will not go away. I suppose that sounds like a strange sort of statement to some, but it is true.

There are moments when something comes to me, say a moment, or a scene, or a flash. Whatever you want to call it, it is suddenly there in my head. It is now like a living entity in my brain. The problem with living things is they grow. The problem with living ideas is they grow at a seemingly accelerated rate.

What one moment was nothing more than a desperate kiss speaking of longing, hope, fear, and secrecy, is suddenly so much more. Suddenly it is an entire world. It is whole people with all their intricacies. Secrets begin whispering themselves to me from the frantic lips of the half conceived characters. The colors darken and start to become more vibrant in this world, the amorphous blobs in the peripheral begin to take shape and come into sharp focus.

Then there it is; a story.

I am not saying that creation happens and it is done. I am not certain it is ever really done. It will continue to grow and form slowly within its new found structure. Sometimes the changes are subtle; a name, a color, a turn of phrase. Sometimes though things pic up and shift dramatically finding your story set in a different state, your suicides turned murder, your heroin become the villain.

It is all there though, in my mind. After a while the stories begin to clutter things up in there. I only have so much space available for new worlds to live inside of me.

I try to tell the stories. I try to breath life into them any way I can so that they might go and live and grow in the world and not just in my head. That is often easier said than done. Sometimes no matter how hard I try I can not get those sepia toned images from my mind to the paper. I look at the words and they mock me. The characters in my head protest that what I have written is not their story. It does them no justice and they can not manifest through that. So they continue to dwell in my head until I can find a way to create them.

Ideas are easy.
Creation is hard.
And they all continue to wait for me to allow them to live.