You will hear the beat of the horses

What is it about gifted young kids challenging conventional wisdom, about standing up against veterans, about questioning the authority and ridiculing all the work of that man. Tell you what, it's irresistible. Not to think but to write impulsively is an art I'm yet to master. But yes, I've been hearing a lot of it from Ray Bradbury. Maybe I should finish reading Zen in the Art of Writing before getting down to Hitch 22 or a Les Miserables. What is it with Gus Van Sant. I've seen two of his films, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester and in both there are gifted kids who mock the dreams, sweat and blood of a man who still cannot fathom how a 16 year old kid does what he hasn't been able to all his life. Sad, so very sad. The fact that someday, when you grow old and are imbibed into the system, a kid barely half your age and with no respect to the love of your life challenges you and perhaps embarasses you infront of all those people from whom you've earned your respect.

Not a movie I really loved but there are some excerpts in it where I was spellbound. Maybe the need to see myself in Jamal was far too overwhelming for me not to find similarities between the both of us and how I could convince myself to be the gifted writer who can look at the world in a way nobody else has and who is good enough to tell it to the world. What else did I want to write about? About spontaneity, about writing and how writing is so much about doing it than thinking about it. God, do I want to do this. I've always believed Bradbury to be spot on when he said, wake up, write for an hour everyday and then get back to it. Forrester has a similar argument. He says, in the first draft, don't think, just write. And then in the second, use your head. But I know somewhere deep inside, I just understood that using a conjunction to begin a sentence is not always recommended and realised that there is more to the art of writing than words jammed together, that if I maintain a strict regimen of writing everyday, make a habit out of it, breathe it out and read all that I can, someday I'd convince myself that I'm worth being published. Not that it's an incentive to write. I know what I'm talking about. Initially yes, the need to be recognised, praised and talked about pushed me into writing but then on, its upto you, to talk to yourself, to write for yourself, that the biggest incentive in writing is itself. Tacky, I know and a variant of the Zen saying. Right now, as I type this, I think I'm a Salinger or a Hemingway typing away to glory. As the clock strikes midnight, the entire house is quiet, all that can be heard is the sound of crickets through the window next to me and the hypnotizing rhythm of my typewriter creating worlds from ink and weaving worlds through the intricate web of my thoughts. Yes, I do realise I'm getting far too flowery to be sober but that is because I'm far too sleepy and still tranced by the words of Forrester.

That's about it. That being my first draft. I don't think I'll have a second draft to this but I'll get back tomorrow correcting all those seemingly little errors which could ruin the best of pieces. Till then, to the greatest of writers who unfurled our imaginations and who taught us that words have power enough to drive a man insane.