The voice.
To Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams, it said. “If you build it, he will come.”
In that story, Kinsella builds a baseball field in his Iowa cornfield that opens a portal into the past, allowing bygone baseball players to play again. Believers in the field’s power are redeemed when they set foot on it, their potential realized when they step to the plate.
Lately, Ive been doing a lot of listening to a little voice inside my own head. Mine says something more like, “If you write it, they will read.” So, my project has been to build such a field for myself, a medium that opens the creative floodgates and allows ideas both new an old to have a ball…game. So far, the desk and the chair have made a difference in their own rights but I’m learning that a workspace is, like the work that comes out of it, a labor of love.
Ray Kinsella is assured that people will come, by a writer no less. In the movie, Terrence Mann is portrayed by James Earl Jones, the man in possession of THE voice. “They’ll come for reasons they can’t even fathom,” he says. “They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past…it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.”
Which is how people should feel when they read what I’ll write.
Some substance. Some style. Some social commentary 