Books That Get In Your Blood

I'm going to write about writing this month.  I know.  You are floored.  Shocked.

Well, maybe if it's you're first time here you are, otherwise you are now rolling your eyes and skimming to the end to see if I say anything interesting, juicy or gossipy.  You're scanning to see if the buttons you're pushing are getting the tweaks you wanted or if I'm still rolling along in my own little vapor cloud.

Last night I watched a movie.

I know!  Now you are actually shocked.

Let me calm your nerves.  It was a movie about an author writing a book.

Feel better now?

Anyway.

The movie was Capote.

It is the movie of the author Truman Capote writing the novel In Cold Blood.  

I didn't even know this movie existed until earlier this week.  Yes, I am still living under that same rock.

I loved the movie.  I'd actually even like to watch it again.

It was beautiful to look at in many scenes.

It was fascinating to "watch" an author work.

It was frightening.
Not because of the subject, but because of the increasing unraveling of Truman Capote.

The writing of this novel unwound him.  It consumed him.  It destroyed him.

As I watched I had a small voice chattering in the background of my mind.

What if there were a book like that in you?  Would you sacrifice many years of your life to write it?  What if you believed like he did, that it would be a book that would change things forever forward?

Capote wrote the book believing it would change the people who read it.

He died in 1984, having never finished another book.  I read it sometime late in that year or early in 1985.

I was in middle school when I read it.

I know, I know.  Not appropriate and all that.  Well, I guess I never was.  My friends read Harlequin's.  I read V.C. Andrews and Agatha Christie.  I read In Cold Blood.

It was a book that has stuck with me all through my life.  I suppose in a way it's a part of me.

Maybe it's why I so easily and continuously see the gray and why I have such a very hard time with the black and white.  When I get to a black and white point in my life with something, it means I've been pushed way too far or I've given away far too much of my soul.

Maybe it's a part of why I am so driven to put words on pages, day after day of my life.  I feel like I've been writing my story and my stories since high school.  Millions of words.  Millions of them tossed away.