Friday 21 March 2014

Should Have, Could Have

I began writing when I was five years old.
I clearly remember taking some lose sheets of paper from an old notebook, stapling them together to make my very own homemade paperback, and writing a poem with a stolen pen from my father's drawer (because I hadn't yet graduated from pencils to pens) about stars--aptly titled 'Stars'--and a fairy tale about a princess who had been turned into a rose-bush  by her evil stepmother. I also gave illustrations to the best of my ability, and yes, a handsome prince did save the rose-bush princess and they did manage to live happily ever after.
That "paperback" is now lost, must have been thrown away by someone unknowingly assuming it was trash.
Nearly twenty years after my first tryst with ink, paper and imagination, I am at the doorstep of a giant idea which I believe will make for a very interesting story. I don't want to mess it up or allow it to die at the hands of laziness, writer's block or procrastination. Writing articles or poetry is easy and I think anyone with any will or desire can conjure up something. A book worth reading, worth buying, worth selling, worth writing--that's the real deal.
I don't want to start right now because of the hundred and one things that I am supposed to be doing at the moment (and this blog post does not figure in the list of things I ought to be wasting my precious time on).
I have a potentially life-changing exam waiting for me on the other side of April, and grad school applications and the rest of that jazz. I should definitely not be giving mind-space to a possible work of fiction.
My father wasn't really too wrong when he said the other day,"How did she manage to become a doctor?!"
I'm all for duality, though.
Yin and Yang, baby.

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