Raise Your Hopeful Voice

It is interesting how things work, sometimes. The previous post was from Friday, and as the tone of it suggests, I was feeling pretty unsure of where I am as a professional writer and where I am going.

That evening when I got home, my wife had picked some movies up from the library. (I’m a big fan of movies in general, and I’ve dragged my wife into my passion for cinema. For her part, she’s added to it by introducing me to foreign films I wouldn’t have watched when I was younger, and together we’ve plunged deeper and deeper into the magic of movies.) One of the movies she’d brought home was “Once,” which I recognized purely for the fact that the song which won the Academy Award for “Best Song” this year was from that movie. I didn’t really remember it, but I was curious to see if the music from the movie was as good as people had raved that it was.

Well, different people like different things, so don’t take this as a recommendation to see the movie necessarily, but I really liked it. It was low budget, an Indie film, but really well done, and I thought the music was fabulous. The plot, basically, is about the collision of two musical people and the songs they record together, as their lives so briefly intersect. It captures in a lot of ways the passion anyone of artistic inclination feels toward their craft, and the struggle to produce something worthy that many go through who aren’t paid for their labor but are talented and gifted nonetheless.

The oscar song, Falling Slowly, really struck me, especially the repeated line “raise your hopeful voice,” which was especially apt that night, given what I’d been wrestling with. After the movie, I dropped by YouTube and found the clip of the Oscar moment for Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who sing the song, and in Hansard’s almost giddy, emotional acceptance speech, he implores the audience to “make art, make art.”

I suppose many writers out there, laboring in obscurity, might think my genre fiction efforts in The Binding of the Blade hardly qualify as art, but if I may take a little license with the word, I was encouraged by the song and by Hansard to embrace the love for story which was first and foremost driving me when I set out on this writing journey to begin with, never knowing if I’d be published at all.

I still don’t know where I am, exactly, or where I’m going, professionally, but that’s all right. People rarely know as much as they think they know about such things. It is enough to know I have a love for words, and to a degree, a gift for story, and I will use it as I may.