The First Pages

Tonight I'm inspired to write by what might seem an unlikely source... television.

Okay, or Hulu, really.  I just finished watching the pilot episode of "The Carrie Diaries" - the prequel to "Sex and the City."

At the end of the episode, Carrie sits down at her desk in front of her bedroom window, though instead of the ubiquitous laptop, she's got an empty notebook in front of her.  She ends the episode by saying (in voice-over, of course), "The city was no longer a fantasy, it was real. And I knew now I wasn’t searching for someone or somebody here. I was searching for me. Who I was. Who I wanted to be. Finding my voice wasn’t going to be easy. But for the first time, in a long time, I thought it might be fun."

In another scene, Carrie is walking outside her school carrying a black and white marble composition book.  I only ever bought a few of those, thinking them more romantic than practical.  Beautiful, but it was harder to hide what you were writing (spiral bound allows you to flip the page over so only the page you are currently writing on is visible) and just not as comfortable for me to write in.  But it was my first black and white comp book in which I scribbled what I consider my first real stories.  And even though they sometimes didn't make sense (my brothers gave me crap about describing a piece of milk hanging from a string), that's part of the romantic, imaginative beauty of them.

Thinking back to those first attempts at storytelling helps me to remember that telling stories is what I do.  It's sort of what we all do, in our own ways.  Be it a piece of music, or a nailpolish-splattered handbag, or an impromptu hula-hoop session... all these creations we put out into the world say something about who we are and what we live for and who we love and who we want to become.