by Colson Rudd ’24
A Glimpse Behind the Curtain
The following is a creative writing piece I did to describe my experience with writing, particularly with forgetting my stories in the middle of writing them or losing momentum and motivation to finish them. It’s a struggle that I’m working with even to this day, and I post it here to comfort those who go through the same sorts of things.
Sleepless Nights
Many nights are “cold sweat” nights. They’re 3 a.m. nights, dark and stormy nights, with nature’s most recognizable percussion tip-tapping at the glass of my window. Many nights are writing nights. Deprived of my senses in the velvet empty, the ideas seem to swell in my breast like a warcry. They give me an ultimatum; write, or writhe. And so I pick up the pen, I press down the keys, I acquiesce, I concede, I appease: I write. Worlds unfold before me like the cardboard pages of a pop-up picture book, compelling my fingers to move. To keep the story inside is to itch, to twitch, and to suffer. So I write. At every opportunity, I write, if only to prove to myself that I still can. The pages fill, the story appears, and for a time, all is well. The itch is scratched, the thirst is slaked… but the wellspring dries eventually. It always does. When the font runs dry, the story withers. It’s shelved like an outgrown toy, where it sits, gathers dust, and is eventually lost. Forgotten. I hate that. I hate it all the more when the writing nights come again, as they always do. A rejuvenating rain, they come, as they always do. There comes the sweat, and the thumping, bumping, jumping against my the backside of my ribs like so much thunder. And with it, with the storm, come the stories. New and fresh, like an acquaintance; old and familiar, like a reopened wound. And while I desperately scribble what they reveal to me while my feeble mind can grasp it, they taunt me. Because they’ll fade again, as they always do.
…
The sun rises. My eyes hurt. The computer screen glows, and the yellow-gray of dawn’s first breaths seeps through my shutters. Pages lie before me, penned by a different, more fevered hand. I feel the heat of inspiration rolling off of my body like steam, the specter finally releasing its grip on my mind. What I have down is what there will be, at least for the foreseeable future. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll lapse back into the flow state, slip back into the stream between streams, where the thoughts and ideas flock to me as shepherd, as sculptor, to dictate their form and nature. And if I’m not? If I’m not, the story will wait until the sleepless nights come again. “Surely,” I thought, “there must be some way to force the ideas out, to coax them into being on demand. There must be some way for me to escape this cycle of inspiration and amnesia.” That drive leads me here to you. I sit, and I listen, and I absorb. I comment. I learn. Because I desperately want to escape the cycle, to see the fleeting embers of an idea and coax them back into an inferno. I come to you in order to prevent the fade. I learn in order to catch a ghost, and hold it in my bare hands.