I've taken a hiatus from writing lately. I think I might have mentioned that in a previous post, but maybe not. There's a few reasons for this, some external and some internal. The external ones are less important; they really amount to little more than thinly-veiled excuses. The reality is that I stay distracted, externally, primarily by video games, which have been a bane to my productivity for years - really ever since I started playing MMOs. But that's a whole separate post and, lately, the grip of such things is loosening on me - I don't buy many new games anymore and what I have periodically becomes boring, which puts me into better places insofar as writing or reading go. Otherwise, video games still serve a purpose - MMOs are a social outlet for someone like me who has lived in three states over the past five years and has friends scattered across the country; single-player games provide a great way to streamline my thought patterns and let them drift to other things while keeping me occupied otherwise... it's almost meditative. Maybe that's another thinly-veiled excuse.
Anyway, internally, I haven't really had something passionate to write about. It's hard to write without passion or motivation... as much as I try to work on older works, revise them to publishable form, etc... it's hard to do it because those works don't feel relevant to me right now. Doesn't mean I can't go back to them later, but right now, they just don't fit - they're square pegs and right now I'm a round hole. Or something (that's what she said?).
I have at least one great story in me. I've known this almost all my life. It's still there. But it's a slippery thing and, as a result, almost impossible to get a hold of. Whether or not I'm writing, that story is never far from my thoughts. I'm always thinking, always pondering. To help stimulate thought further, I've decided to pick up a couple books that might be more in-line with where I am now - two of Thomas Wolfe's works: Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again.
Thematically, I have two primary interests at the moment. The first surrounds the feeling of home and homesickness and homelessness of someone who has moved on from his hometown, but still yearns for it and feels a strong bond to it. The second is the plight of the young adult in today's world. For a person like me, I feel as though I was promised a world as I grew up - and once I grew up, that world was gone, changed, into something entirely new and different and challenging. The whole idea throughout school and youth was to get a degree, get a job/career, and retire eventually after a career with a company. That world appears gone. How do we cope with that? There's a sense of lost-ness in this generation, the so-called "Millenials," as a result. It's an interesting conundrum.
How do I entwine those concepts, make a story of it? I'm not sure. But it's there, somewhere. And perhaps, reading other fiction more relevant to the subject - like Wolfe's work, or perhaps Steinbeck's - will help coax it out of me.
