To Find A Dream

I spent a pleasant few hours yesterday afternoon at the used book sale. Among my finds were two books about writing. One was part of a series called "Form and Content in Literature" and this particular book was "The Theme of the Hero". Flipping through the pages I found that the book contained the short story "The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane which Ed Gorman had spoken so highly of on his blog the other day, so I tossed the book into my bag. The second book was "Story-crafting" by Paul Darcy Boles which is about the craft of writing short stories.

As always when I come home from these sales, I flip through the books savoring my finds and deciding where to start. Flipping through the hero book brought me a pleasant surprise. Besides Crane's short story there were eight other shorts, some poetry, and some writing essays that had been mentioned in several places recently. I also noted that the previous owner had underlined a great deal of the book's content. And I wondered if I'd stumbled across another like-minded soul.

Within the pages of "Story-crafting" I've found a man who loves the short story as much as I do. I'm enjoying the reading and the lessons he's shared and as I read through this book, I keep thinking, "Oh, I should share this on my blog". But even more than the lessons, I found something else within the pages of this book. The dreams of the previous owner.

I found carefully underlined passages and as I skipped through the pages reading them I could see the questions forming in this woman's mind as they do in mine. And then I found the page of notes. A quickly sketched outline of a short story, character names, goals, wants. The writing is cramped and barely readable but this struck me. "Articulate beautiful writerly lies. What more interesting life could you want? What more could you want?"

I had stumbled onto someone's dream and at the same time, my dream. And I'm left wondering if this woman ever wrote her story or if it still remains a dream known only to her and now, by accident, me.