I’ll take the challenge. All that will happen is that I will get better in the long run. Unless you’re a special talent, the path to success will test your endurance and character. I’m not a special talent, this doesn’t come easy to me. Often I’m confounded by what I need to do, what the next move is.
I threw this gauntlet down myself, it’s a challenge no one asked me to take. The world is just as happy to have me shuffling into the beige monster day after day, a drone feeding the queen, than having me finding a way to live differently. More likely, the world wants me that way more. I challenged myself to be a writer and I will be.
Not settled or satisfied with being a nameless automaton, this is my path. I will tell the stories that arrive in my midnight mind. The thoughts that wake me and possess my heart crying out to leave the prison of my imagination. I work on my craft, I work on getting better. With every word, like every author before and after me, the improvements come.
We are not special. Us, writers, storytellers, musicians, artists, are not special in our talents. None of it is easy. Recognition and sustenance from our labor is a pot of gold at a rainbow’s end, mythic and improbable. Few taste that fruit of success with little effort.
We are special. Us, writers, storytellers, musicians, artists, are special in our transparent souls, persistence, and passion for the work. We funnel the flooding creation onto our blank spaces filling pages, canvases and dead air. We taste the sublime satisfaction of a creation seeing the dawn of a new world. It’s for this, I’ll take the challenge.