About six months ago, I had an epiphany. For years I have thought of myself as a writer, plain and simple. It didn’t matter to me what the medium was – playscripts, film scripts, fiction, essay, reviews, poetry, etc. – I was a writer and that was that. But after completing the script of my first full-length play, The Beating of a Warrior’s Heart, I had the realization that I am, first and foremost, a playwright. As much as I wanted to write about anything and everything under the sun, I discovered that all of these random side projects were keeping me from doing what I do best – writing plays.
And so for the last six months I stopped all of my other writing. I began to discover ways to adapt stories that I had once thought were destined for the world of prose into pieces that could fit on the stage. I stopped writing about film because I wanted to spend more time creating art than commenting on it. I even stopped my obsessive-compulsive use of lists and rankings. It was such a freeing time.
Of course, I let the website here fall into disrepair. As beautiful as the site was, it just took too much time to add pages and format scripts and code everything that I would get overwhelmed just thinking about making any updates. I even briefly considered getting rid of joshhornbeck.com all together.
But at a staff Christmas party, I was sitting at a table where the discussion eventually turned to films. In expressing my preference for movies that don’t resolve into a tidy and false happy ending, one of the people at my table said, “Yeah. We’ll you’re just one of those artsy-people, aren’t you? Most of us just want light and happy entertainment.”
His statement really bothered me. Not only was he completely dismissing any opinion I might have, he was willfully giving in to shallow and trite sentimentalism. I began to get that old itch again, that itch to start sharing my thoughts and feelings about art, about faith, and about the culture we live in.
So, here we are. It’s a new website design that will hopefully make it easier for me to post articles, reviews, and the like without getting overwhelmed by technical concerns. And I’m also excited that this new format will allow you to post comments and questions. I’m really looking forward to having more of a conversation with you all about these issues of faith, film, art, and the culture around us.