[title subtitle=”WORDS Stoney Stamper
IMAGE April Stamper”][/title]
I sit and stare blankly at the blinking cursor on the page. It’s patiently waiting for me to begin, to type out some hilarious, sad, or touching words about my family, or some of our animals, or perhaps something sweet and insightful. I’m usually full of words. When I was a little boy just learning to talk, my loud yet deep voice could be heard all over the house, yapping non-stop. Forty years later, and that is one thing that hasn’t changed.
I love words. I even have favorite words that I do my best to use in regular conversation, like verisimilitude, superfluous, and magnanimous. It’s especially satisfying if the other participant in the conversation doesn’t understand them. Maybe it gives me a slight feeling of superiority. In my head I am shouting, “I know so many words! I know more words than you!” So, as you can see, becoming a writer wasn’t that much of a stretch for me. My love of words led me straight to books, the printed page. I loved how authors like Hemingway, Poe, or Rand, could take a dozen words, give or take, and when arranged in just the right way, create the most beautiful masterpiece. We may all have the same words to work with, but like clay in the hands of a master, the world is gifted stories such as The Old Man and The Sea, or The Fountainhead.
Now, I’m not comparing myself to any of those famous writers. But I do share one common trait with them. In fact, I share this common trait with most anyone who has ever tried to write a novel, or a feature for a magazine, or even a term paper in high school. It’s writer’s block. And oooooh, we all hate writer’s block. For someone whose always had the words, always had the stories, there is absolutely nothing more infuriating than staring at this blinking cursor, waiting for inspiration to strike. Over the years, I have written more stories than I can count. You would think it would be easy, right? But there comes a point, when you feel like you’ve told all of your stories. This story sounds the exact same as that story, this title is too similar to a title from a story from four years ago.
So, I stop. I take a breath. Walk away from the screen for a moment and tell myself to return to my training, to my roots. The theory is, if you just start writing, or typing, anything and everything that comes to mind, you’ll eventually land on something worth writing. Something will stick. I’ve always been a stream of consciousness writer, and many times, my brain will be going faster than my hands can type. So here I am, with my deadline already passed, feeling like I am writing nonsense and hoping a story begins to form. Lucky for you, I’ve had to delete most of my words, because they either didn’t make sense or I didn’t feel them worth reading. And some of it probably wasn’t appropriate, because my head, when unbridled, is a weird place to be.
I once wrote a story about a gorilla named Kerchak that lived in the headboard of my bed. In one of my common fits of insomnia, I was lying in bed and looking at the headboard. When studying the grain of the wood, I saw the outline of the face of a gorilla, but with only one eye. I wrote a long, sordid story of Kerchak’s life, complete with his love life, his children, jealousy of some of the younger, stronger, more handsome gorillas. I wrote that entire convoluted story for no particular reason at all. Just because I saw the faintest outline of a gorilla’s face in my headboard. That’s not weird at all, right?
Another time, I wrote a story about an empty box that was blowing around in the bed of my truck. It blew in circles all around the bed of my truck for over an hour, while driving home from Shreveport, Louisiana. It just wouldn’t blow out! I found myself rooting for the box, all the way home. It would get so close to blowing out but would somehow stay. It was like watching Rudy. The underdog, that just wouldn’t give up. Would you believe a story about a cardboard box would eventually become one that thousands of people would read on my website? A story about an empty box. I’m not sure what that says about me, but I’m also not sure what that says about the thousands of people that took the time to read it. Either way, there are a lot of weirdos out there reading nonsense. But hey, it’s my nonsense, so that makes it totally appropriate.
If a writer ever tells you that they’ve never suffered from this affliction, then I’d argue that they haven’t written very much. Every famous writer, and every writer that wants to be famous, has done what I’m doing now. Staring at a blank white page, curser blinking, hoping a story will somehow form, bringing joy and jubilance to all who read it. But so far, nothing quite so triumphant has come to mind. So, I suppose that my Great Expectations, or The Catcher in the Rye will have to wait for another time.
In my despair, I remember this: not every story a writer puts to paper will be an instant classic. As a matter of fact, I’d say about ninety-five percent of everything we write, no one will ever read. But to me, that five percent is no more important than the other ninety-five percent that no one reads. Even if they aren’t the greatest pieces of literature ever written, they’re still mine. And even if they’re a bit goofy, or over the top, they’re still a little piece of my odd mind, saved and recorded forever. Can you imagine my great grandkids going through my things in the year 2070, reading some crazy story about grandpa’s headboard gorilla? They’ll think I was completely insane. And I’m absolutely fine with that. Hopefully they’ll tell stories about their crazy grandpa Stoney, who they loved more than life, and my legend will live on.
Oh, and will you look at that? Turns out, I found something to write about after all.
