Being a writer doesn’t come with guarantees; not even a sheet of paper to toss words out like candy at a Thanksgiving Day Parade. Yet like cackling chickens in beat up weathered hen houses everything resembles clutter until a passerby gets too close to the fences separating shared conversation from the real world inviting everything to stop.
Have you ever walked into a chicken gathering? The rooster is usually the first to take note of the unannounced visitation. Within seconds the cluck, cluck, clackity cluck, clucking becomes an instant bawk stare, bawk bawk…pace the dirt stained floor of the house, bawk, stare.
Growing up in Montana jeans and colorful KISS T-shirts much of my chores were spent studying the path of the egg maker. As much as one might learn from the calm protective mannerisms of the hen fluffed out in bin number sixteen; it was usually the runner that inspired me the most…she who constantly located secret places to stack her creations so the human child couldn’t place them in metal buckets.
She was onto me…a chameleon decked out in white feathers sporting a dull red comb; easily coming across as the typical seen one chicken you’ve seen them all. But that’s not true if you take the time to study everything around you. Runners get extremely nervous when the human enters areas of assumed covert operations. They begin to walk with tempo knowing something they cherish dearly is about to be invaded.
I never took a runner’s eggs. Dad would get red faced and furious calling my act of cowardly ways as being an open door for snakes, rats and raccoons to step inside an inner city farmer’s Wafflehouse after midnight and take on the sunny side up egg-travaganza.
No morning sunrise can glide across the open sky until the human approach to living is given sound.
It’s when you walk into an already born conversation that you qualify to take with you the methods of communication your circle of friends and family use to make sure the next set of twenty four hours delivered have reason to be remembered.
The everyday human hen house is brimming with out of control writers of all types without having to label or tag the concept as being the stick figure stuck holding a pen in one hand while the other lazily balances the pages perfectly so you don’t skip out of the lines.
There are so many different styles of writing; pictures from a past make a great place to begin but it’s completely unhealthy to live there. Sonic booms blessed with incredibly cool ideas rock your desire to make a difference at work only to come face to face with decision makers nibbling on secret agendas that won’t include you until they introduce change.
But does this runner invite rats, snakes and raccoons? As a writer you can take cartoon characters and turn them into storylines that become e-books, reasons to blog and or chapters for a long or short story.
If only you trusted your eyes more you’d be a much better writer.
Julia Cameron calls it painting the room. Bring life to your expression by exposing the growing crack in the wall near the ceiling while uncovering the scent of last nights dinner refusing to leave the house and yet its gentle kiss in the morning makes way for the positive actions and reactions to what played out before calling it quits so late in the evening.
Writing can also be rapping. Between 1985 and 1990 the thought of being a poet with a pen was an embarrassing journey so I elected to do what is now called Slamming…taking words and putting them out in the open by way of expressing deeply the message so that those in attendance didn’t waste their time trying to figure out what the artist meant. While Hip Hop and Gangsta were slowly coming onto the scene there I was in the studio banging the beats in a way most musicians never touched because being a rock star meant you either sounded like Steven Tyler and Ashford and Simpson or you disrespecting Bob Dylan.
For the first time in nearly ten years I went back to those dusty cassette tapes like a chicken farmer returns to his hen house. There they were packed with just as much egg making energy as the day they were created except this time I laughed because no matter how hard you try to change the presence of your future steps…what you assumed was great no longer lives up to your current expectations. That’s the writer in me talking.
Writers may come across weird and drawn in so creative people tend to stay free of judgment. Radio people usually don’t understand anything beyond microphones and the speakers that connect listeners to their world. To be writing with rhythm and rhyme orchestrated a stage presence that thoroughly kept me from DJ circles laced with free concert tickets and talk about a Led Zep reunion, Bon Jovi being a real rock band and the freakishly hard drive behind a new song from Phil Collins called Su Susudio.
How you speak and what you discuss, text, email and put out there for others to read or listen to makes you a writer. Rather than be the runner that hides your eggs, learn to be the big ole fluffy hen with Rock n Roll stripes down your back that sits in bin number fourteen and cackles like no tomorrow the very second one of those eggs becomes a part of everybody’s reality.
The problem with today’s business world is we’ve lost the natural born leaders that once coached writers, painters, incredible thinker’s and do it all costs…today we do by way of surviving and in the end we’re nothing more than chickens hiding from everyday life in the shell of a worn out tire tossed into a hen house that’s never prepared for an unannounced rat, snake or raccoon to enter.
What will you write today?
I will always believe in you first…
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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