It feels different in real life
I got an email yesterday that said my application is complete. So I am officially maybe going to go back to school to get an MFA. If I get accepted I'm definitely going anyway, though I have about 8 weeks until I hear. I was on a long drive yesterday also which gave plenty of time for my mind to wander about it as well.
As is typical for me I started out with very practical thoughts about needing to pack up my house and move and wondering which of my limited pool of friends who knows how to drive a standard I can get to drive my car the 400 miles while I drive the moving truck. The image in my head of me doing that led me to remember an image from a story from years ago. Don't know if it was a movie or a book, I'm a visual thinker so I tend to remember books from the images they paint in my head anyway. It was a story about a woman probably my age (I remember her as "older" but I would have been in my 20s at the time) who was trying to decide if she should make a big change in her life. It ended with an image of her driving down the highway to whatever this new adventure was. Possibly even going back to school, I don't quite recall. I was struck with a sort of "huh, they tell stories about people like me."
Except not. Or at least not that story. As I recall, most of the story was about making the decision to do whatever it was. Should she pack up and leave behind everything she knew to go off and risk this new thing which hopefully would make life better, but you never know. They made a whole movie/book out of that decision making process. I will freely admit that I put a lot of thought into this decision - as one should - but it wasn't the sort of thinking that would make an interesting plot.
At one point there was a conversation between Hero and Friend and Hero said, well if I do this thing by the time I'm done I'll be 45 (or whatever) and then what? And Friend said, after two years you'll still be 45 even if you don't do it and then what? And that sort of thought never even crossed my mind. Maybe it would be different if it were really starting from scratch with something new, but this is more of a lateral move. So yes, it occurred to me that I'll be 44 when I finish this degree, but only in the sense of I shouldn't wait much longer if I think I want this or else I won't have enough working years left to pay off all the loans.
Maybe I'm just practical and boring. I was looking at the next 20-25 years that I will realistically be working, thought about how I want to fill that time and where I want it to end, realized that the path I'm on had drifted away from where I wanted to be going, and decided to do something about that. Or maybe I'm having a mid life crisis and rather than buying a motorcycle (an idea I did toy with) decided to take 2 years off from the responsible life, accrue a ton of debt, and spend my time in film school playing around making movies. It is way more debt than the motorcycle with not really many more guarantees, but I do love the idea that maybe some day someone will actually pay me to make films - or at least be part of the film making process.
As part of the program I will take at least one class in scriptwriting. In fact I'll probably take more as electives because it interests me. So I look at my actual life and compare it to this fictional life of this woman who is like me but not. Is it that I'm boring and practical (not that I want to be anything else)? Or is it that someone was inspired by real life boring people and was able to embellish and fictionalize and turn it into something else? My problem with writing isn't usually the actual writing, it's the coming up with ideas in the first place. Maybe I just need to find ways to be more inspired by the mundane.
As my tag says, don't mind me. I'm just thinking out loud in the hopes that I can get it out of my head entirely for the next 2 months. I would like to not think about it again until I know for sure one way or the other. Certainly that will be easier said than done.
As is typical for me I started out with very practical thoughts about needing to pack up my house and move and wondering which of my limited pool of friends who knows how to drive a standard I can get to drive my car the 400 miles while I drive the moving truck. The image in my head of me doing that led me to remember an image from a story from years ago. Don't know if it was a movie or a book, I'm a visual thinker so I tend to remember books from the images they paint in my head anyway. It was a story about a woman probably my age (I remember her as "older" but I would have been in my 20s at the time) who was trying to decide if she should make a big change in her life. It ended with an image of her driving down the highway to whatever this new adventure was. Possibly even going back to school, I don't quite recall. I was struck with a sort of "huh, they tell stories about people like me."
Except not. Or at least not that story. As I recall, most of the story was about making the decision to do whatever it was. Should she pack up and leave behind everything she knew to go off and risk this new thing which hopefully would make life better, but you never know. They made a whole movie/book out of that decision making process. I will freely admit that I put a lot of thought into this decision - as one should - but it wasn't the sort of thinking that would make an interesting plot.
At one point there was a conversation between Hero and Friend and Hero said, well if I do this thing by the time I'm done I'll be 45 (or whatever) and then what? And Friend said, after two years you'll still be 45 even if you don't do it and then what? And that sort of thought never even crossed my mind. Maybe it would be different if it were really starting from scratch with something new, but this is more of a lateral move. So yes, it occurred to me that I'll be 44 when I finish this degree, but only in the sense of I shouldn't wait much longer if I think I want this or else I won't have enough working years left to pay off all the loans.
Maybe I'm just practical and boring. I was looking at the next 20-25 years that I will realistically be working, thought about how I want to fill that time and where I want it to end, realized that the path I'm on had drifted away from where I wanted to be going, and decided to do something about that. Or maybe I'm having a mid life crisis and rather than buying a motorcycle (an idea I did toy with) decided to take 2 years off from the responsible life, accrue a ton of debt, and spend my time in film school playing around making movies. It is way more debt than the motorcycle with not really many more guarantees, but I do love the idea that maybe some day someone will actually pay me to make films - or at least be part of the film making process.
As part of the program I will take at least one class in scriptwriting. In fact I'll probably take more as electives because it interests me. So I look at my actual life and compare it to this fictional life of this woman who is like me but not. Is it that I'm boring and practical (not that I want to be anything else)? Or is it that someone was inspired by real life boring people and was able to embellish and fictionalize and turn it into something else? My problem with writing isn't usually the actual writing, it's the coming up with ideas in the first place. Maybe I just need to find ways to be more inspired by the mundane.
As my tag says, don't mind me. I'm just thinking out loud in the hopes that I can get it out of my head entirely for the next 2 months. I would like to not think about it again until I know for sure one way or the other. Certainly that will be easier said than done.