Story Telling

While listening to Neil Diamond's newest CD, "The Road Home", I've had an epiphany of sorts. The first and I'd say the most important is that my soul is starving for music. The second is, I don't have to struggle to write while listening to music. This is something I've always known, but life often times gets in the way of what we know.

I've also had some thoughts on music, writing, and storytelling in general. In "The Road Home", on top of being great music, Neil Diamond sings about playing/writing music for the very first time or for the hundredth he realizes that is why he was created, so that he could share with the world this great gift he's been given.

I've always gotten the same feeling from putting a story down on paper for the very first time - meeting the characters and entering into that portion of their lives that they are sharing with me and eventually me with you.

Writing music or a song, if you will, is like telling a story where in addition to using words to tell your story, the musician touches us with the melodies that those words go with.

In writing a story, the writer (me) has to create those melodies and feelings with words. The success come when the writer reaches the reader and brings them into new worlds of time and space, joy and sorrow, fear and terror, hate and love. Both mediums are telling a story.

I think that we humans have inbred into our DNA a need for stories. There are stories that teach, stories that warn, stories that delight, and stories that frighten us (which is another way of warning us that there is danger all around us). Through these stories, we are able to learn where we come from and where we are going.

It's only been since the early 20th century that we've been able to add a new medium to our story telling - that of the motion picture. This is where our imaginations, technology, and great story telling can affect millions of people in almost the blink of an eye.