Westerns
and writing
7 March, 2000
“Ok, from 7pm tonight I'm busy for two hours.”
“Some sport on tv again huh?”
“Nope, even better than that!”
“A movie then?”
“Yup, what sort of movie?”
“A western … ”
“With a Bob Dylan soundtrack — it doesn't get much better than that.”
And it doesn't. “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” is a wonderful elegiac movie. It suffused with death and underpinned by a haunting Dylan soundtrack. It's a movie about choices, and pride, and friendship, and dying.
I've always loved Westerns. I wonder if that's an old-fashioned thing nowadays? It's certainly true to say they don't make 'em like that anymore.
I had coffee this afternoon with someone I met last year at a Small Business club meeting. She's a writer. Both as a job doing freelance/contract writing, and as a creative writer. She said she spends time in the morning writing creatively, and time in the afternoon doing writing to get paid. I asked her about the need to be dedicated, to set time aside and just write. She agreed, saying that, yes, you do get those moment of inspiration in the middle of the night, but you really need to be writing every day to get them and make use of them.
I've always thought that, perhaps, I could write. But I've never thought of myself as a writer. I don't know where this journal stands. Debbie came in to see me tonight — she'd been reading some back entries — and called it a gift. That's such a wonderful thing to hear.
I guess the journal just is. I shouldn't try and fit it into any category except where it lands when I toss it out to the world. I like my criteria of writing something I'd like to read; although I rarely go back and read what I've written.
Just the act of typing is good sometimes. Fingers moving, words appearing on the screen. It's a freeing process for me — words come, sometimes fitting, sometimes not, but always coming from somewhere inside my head to make a sentence.
I almost always feel good when I've written an entry. I think that's a good thing.