This is an exercise in putting something out— it’s not perfect, it’s from a musing of mine from August 11, 2021. It’s not a particularly special piece of writing, but it’s part of my commitment to make a new post every day. This writing was an effort to place myself in a world and just write what I saw in that world:
I’m a dragon. No no no, I’m riding on a dragon. No no no, I can feel the scales of the dragon underneath my fingertips. I’m careful not to scratch or claw, because I can feel that the skin is sensitive. It wrinkles if you grab for too much of it at a time. It’s so big and it’s actually warm to the touch. Firm muscle underneath loose skin. The scales feel just like an iguana’s skin. Warm, loose around firm muscle. It’s amazing to grab hold and just hang on without it fighting or wrestling to get me off. It feels like an actual connection. It knows I’m on it’s back and yet it still continues soaring through the air with no intentions of knocking me off. I grab big handfuls of skin on either side as handholds.
Am I really loving writing lately? Not really to be honest. It’s still a real high to go to those weird places though—like riding on the back of a dragon—that’s pretty fucking cool. To feel that loose skin and the dryness of it’s back, to feel the texture and know inside and out what it would feel like to ride on the back of a dragon. To feel as it walks and feel the shoulder joints and the muscles tense up under the weight of my body. To feel the warmth of the dragon and to be able to describe the side to side motion as it drags that big tale behind it. And to be able to put my ear to it’s ribs and actually be able to hear the heartbeat. That’s pretty special. To see the looks on people’s faces as I stroll by them on the back of a dragon. It’s pretty amazing to ACTUALLY go there and be there. To look back and see the tracks left behind. That is actually legitimately special to be able to do that. I could name it or give it color, I could select a height and a time period and foes and time of day, sounds from around town, if it was country side or urban, what the people around town are wearing, what the townsfolk think of it all, do they get along with the dragon are they surprised or is this normal to see me on the back of a dragon. It’s still pretty special.
Stephen king suggested in his book “On Writing” that writing is the only known form of telepathy. That if you the reader were to imagine a white rabbit with a black square spray painted on its back and that square was filled in with the color purple and inside that square was the number ‘8’ painted in black, you would be seeing a similar rabbit to the one in his mind. Now he argued that of course your rabbit may be bigger or smaller, the ears may be floppy or pointing straight up, maybe the fur is shaggy or short, and so on, but largely the rabbit has been transported largely intact from the writer’s brain to the reader’s brain. And this process he called the only known form of telepathy— writing. Our job as a writer is to go into our mind’s eye and describe the world that we see. The more of the rabbit we’re able to transport from our mind’s eyes to our reader’s brain, the better the writer we are. So my dragon was my selfish description of what I saw that day.