out with the old, in with the new!

this is NOT an autobiography

My stomach hurt from not eating in two days. And my jaw hurt from the clenching. And my palms hurt from the fingernails I dug into my fists. And my eyes hurt from the tears and my head hurt from the sobbing and my heart from it all.

But I guess pain makes for the best stories. Writers in Hollywood think “sex sells”, but the real writers in this world know that it is really pain that sells. Shakespeare and Steinbeck and Kate Chopin figured that out early on. I think the best kind of pain to write about is some sort of deep-seeded emotional pain that was planted there as a child. I once heard a story about a little metal wedge that was lodged into a young tree. I guess the tree decided he could ignore that pesky wedge and just grew around it. After a while he was a beautiful towering Walnut tree. Then one day an angry ice storm came along and, well anyway, the tree never developed on the inside because of that wedge so he was destroyed by that storm. I wish I could have taken the wedge out of that tree when he was just a kid. Maybe I could have saved him.

That is the kind of pain you can’t learn about that in movies or TV. That’s what frustrates me about actors. You never know what they are thinking, you can only assume motives behind what they do or say. And usually my assumptions about people are wrong. Sometimes they have that thoughtful narrator voice that is supposed to help the viewer get into their head a little, but that always seems so cheesy to me. Well anyway, I guess that is what I’ll write about. My deep-seeded emotional pain.

Because pain sells and I want to be a best-selling author.