The unlikely scientist

I was sitting this evening in a chair.  Stock-still.  Thinking about this and that, about how I want to write a novel, and about all of the sane and not so sane reasons that I want to do so.  A few:

- prove I am worthy

- make the expensive education mean something

- begin my journey to accepting an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay (taken from my own novel)

- back up my passion with something actual (indeed, the goal of any life worth living)

And it occurred to me that writing, while part art, is other part science.

There is the figuring out what you really want to say to the world.  Then there is the saying it.  Then there is the saying it better.  And better.  As good as you can get it.  It takes hours in the mind's own laboratory, attempting this, that, and the other thing until what you were searching for reveals itself.

Writing is not invention, but discovery.  Everything is already there--the story waiting to be told, screaming, gasping, hoping to get out of the thought cave and into the world.  Will this writer give me life? it asks.  The writer is the searcher, the try-anything-you-never-know and the one-more-day-and-I'll-get-there sayer, the trial and error maker, the believer in the ultimate power of her work.  And it's a belief so vivid, so her, that it easily washes out the non-believers.

She never stops.  She believes strongly that a world without her words is not acceptable, that Academy Award or no, her laboratory is a legitimate one, and one ordinary evening, in the fading light, what she was meant to know, she will know.

What if someone whispered: it's there just over the hilltop...