Noticed from the stats that it's slowed down here some. That's fair. It's all fair. But every time it does, I become compelled to stretch and walk around a little.
I'm always talking about writing. I tweeted recently the only time I get to talk about it is with the folks on there, but I'm always having a discussion with myself about writing, storytelling, literature. I've been doing it every day since I was ten years old. That's thirty-four years this April. Now, walking around in here in this emptier space, I wonder why for the first time. The very first time, if you can believe that.
The thing is, I'd always thought it was general hubris to a certain extent. It was something I could do pretty well and I wanted people to see that I could do it well. But all these years later I've accomplished more than I would have thought I would. I'm not famous or rich due to my writing, but I have published numerous books I believe were as good as a could write at the time they appeared. Before 2009, not one word I'd written had been published anywhere. So to go from that low status to seeing seven books, nearly 200 short stories, a host of poems and essays published is more than I ever figured would happen.
So hubris ain't it. I've got nothing else to prove to myself. Or anybody else, as far as that goes.
So why am I still having conversations with myself about this thing called literature? Still working for hours each day in hope of creating it at some level worth someone reading?
At this writing, I still don't know. Lately I've come to the basic realization that I'm driven forward by it. I still remember the first time I sat down to write a story, a real story. I found a spiral bound notebook and a pencil and cleared off the coffee table in my grandparent's living room. It was winter and dark. The house was quiet, exactly the way it is here now. I don't remember thinking before I started writing. All I know is that I started that December night and have not stopped since.
Saying it that way, though, I feel I should explain that there's nothing magical about it. I long ago stopped romanticizing the act of making literature. So now, without hubris and without romantic notions, I just keep going. In an empty room, forever alone, I would write and keep writing and keep writing because I simply enjoy it. Why do you?
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Enjoyed and I'm happy for you. My story's similar except that I have little to show for all the mind work. A little like Joseph Grand in Camus' The Plague.
ReplyDeleteI also remember the first time I sat down to write a story. I was seven, though I am not sure about that (time's your friend when you're a happy kid, and perhaps even when you're an unhappy kid - maybe kids can control time the way we've forgotten how? I'll never know unless rebirth is a thing and I get to be a kid again, which is not what I believe) - anyway, I was seven and I must've wanted to get away from home because my story was about a young man (!) who chose "inner emigration", which was profoundly meaningful to me then (not so much now). Since I'm reading Camus' The Plague again, I associate this state with what Rieux in the book calls "the abstraction": when he (as the doctor who must attend the dying patients) can no longer stand to witness the death and the pain of the victims and their families, he withdraws into "the abstraction", and his heart closes. In any case, I only remember the title ("Leopold Wundersam's Inner Emigration"), and the fact that, when I read the story again many years later (having been obsessed with keeping my diaries and notes around - a habit that I only broke last year, shredding a hundred notebooks in the course of liberating myself from said obsession) I found it rather boring and, worst of all, lacking a proper ending. I must have got distracted during composition and continued the care-free suburban life of a single child of upper-middle class parents, a mode of existence that I have essentially continued to live for the last 50 years, apart from living in the city centre now, longing for the suburbs again, and for a garden to get dirty and tired in). It is interesting to me now how the theme of that story - inner emigration - turned out to become my life.
ReplyDeleteYou had some chops even back then. My story was a straight horror story, this rip off Stephen King thing. It was called "The Last Flight" and was centered on this polite flying out of Alaska in an airplane that was haunted. He dies, of course. It was fun though.
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