Lollipop

I've just discovered what has been wrong all of this time. The reason why my writing has not been as descriptive as it should have been. Why my scripts have been so skeletal. For as long as I can remember, I have had an obsessive superstition about the pens that I use to write. If it is a paper for school or a story for my own amusement I would always use the same pen throughout the entire project. I would take meticulous care of the pen and be careful not to lose it. I would also make sure that whichever pen I would start a new project would be new enough to see it all the way through.
But recently I lost a pen. It was the pen that I have been using to write this 4 year long screenplay. Well, I haven’t been using the same pen since 2004, but whenever I start working on any aspect of it, for instance the 3 attempts at a back story, I would use the same pen. Always. Until very recently when I had no choice but to change pens when I lost my pen and had had had to write because the words come in spurts and I gotta get them down before they leave me.
So now I’m on my third pen. And I haven’t written better than this in my entire life, I think. I believe that the reason is that my pen is like a magic wand. It is an extension of my creative self just like my brain, my eyes and my hands and every other part of me that is part of the creative process. It lives. It has feelings, and it even has thoughts and understanding. But if you use the same one over and over it loses some of its creativity. It gets stagnant because, well heck. It’s a pen. It doesn’t learn, it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t have new experiences. It only brings to the table that which it already knows. So it is limited, unlike a human. It is like eating one lollipop and expecting it to change flavors. If you want a new flavor, you must pick up a new lollipop.
Therefore, by changing pens, I allowed the influence, the experience, the creative extension of a new pen to provide the freshness that my writing desperately needed.


Sidebar: These last 4 blog posts are all dated for April 21, but they were all written on different days. It’s just that I have only today been able to get on the internet.