The Forgotten Poems

It's amazing how much the reality of having to WORK at a JOB is making me want to get my writing career moving. Jobs are great and all but I don't know if it fits me right. You know how some people say they are "too real" to be around other people or whatever. I don't think I'm real enough, ya know? A writer has to have one foot in this world - reality - and one foot in the other...that unknown place where all the stories and paintings and songs and sculptures come from. All artists are in touch with that other world. Stephen King in "The Dark Half" said that writers and artists were the only people paid by society to be accepted mediums.

Writing is what I'd rather be doing that something that is...work. And its funny because writing is HARD. VERY VERY HARD. Painful. But there's something else about it too. It's like when Mrs. Lile was talking about running, and the endorphines get released, and runners get this natural running high. I think that writing must have some similar thing but it isn't physical, it doesn't deal with hormones and chemicals, it's something in another world that is inexplicable. Maybe that is reality, more real than this world. Like Plato's physical and nonphysical realms, or like when the two girls see the worm in the forest in the short story that I believe is called "The Thing in the Woods" and they realize that the Worm, a "mythical" creature from the British culture, may actually be more real than us humans and our silly little physical lives.

So maybe that is why people like art in all its forms, because maybe we do want to believe that there is something more real than the daily grind and it gives us the best window to that. Surely as a Christian I believe in a Spiritual world that is more real than this one, so is it a stretch to believe that the same is true for art? I've often felt that the stories my characters live are more Real than the lives we live. And I don't mean real in the way most people do, I mean it in some deeper, nonphysical way. A way most people who think they are real would never understand.

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