I was comparing writing woes with Jaswinder lately -- that we never seem to have enough time to just sit down and write, that we don't seem to get enough recognition, that recognition never seems to be as fulfilling as simply sitting down to write, but still a little recognition would be nice.
This came up during this past quarter while I was teaching a creative writing (fiction introduction) course. The main project for the course was to keep a journal. The idea behind the journal was to perform a sustained, consistent writing. Writers, I believe, should sit down everyday and crank out words, not hellbent on creating a new and equally beautiful Sometimes a Great Notion, but to exercise, much the same as a professional athlete would her body, one's unconscious.
Days after Jaswinder and I spoke about our writing woes, I opened some moving boxes my parents had dropped brought to me recently. I found my college journals, notebooks, and binders for English classes, biology and earth science, Calculus140, Polysci 197, Theatre 203, et al., as well as my personal journals, my drunken notebooks, binders full of laminated papertowels, cigarette packs torn into queer crucifixes and stapled to three-hole-punched cardboard.
It was at that moment that I realized the one thing that I was doing constantly, the thing I backed off during my MFA and the thing I abandoned altogether as a Ph.D. candidate . . . I realized that whatever else I was doing in my life, I was always, also, already writing. I wrote about the subjects for the classes, fictionalized physics, wrote off topic, created worlds in which I was the biology teacher and Dr. M_______ was madly in love with me. I wrote three-line plays and three-page haikus. I started and abandoned novels. I wrote awful things about myself and generous things about exgirlfriends.
At some point, that all fell away. I blame myself, certainly, and at some point, it seemed counterintuitive to begin journaling again. I was a master of fine arts. I was a Ph.D. candidate. I was an adult with children and a mortgage. I had more excuses than I had time to list them.
But I was convinced that I had to start over. I know it was the write decision. So I started running my pen across some pages. Lousy things happened. I wrote about the couch I was sitting on. I wrote about how tall my kids were and how lonely a person might get on a desert island. I wrote about waking up and realizing everything was all a dream. I wrote dreams. I wrote more about the couch, some about the television, a touch about the future of humanity. All boring stuff. All awfully written. All terribly embarrassing. I loved every word.
This came up during this past quarter while I was teaching a creative writing (fiction introduction) course. The main project for the course was to keep a journal. The idea behind the journal was to perform a sustained, consistent writing. Writers, I believe, should sit down everyday and crank out words, not hellbent on creating a new and equally beautiful Sometimes a Great Notion, but to exercise, much the same as a professional athlete would her body, one's unconscious.
Days after Jaswinder and I spoke about our writing woes, I opened some moving boxes my parents had dropped brought to me recently. I found my college journals, notebooks, and binders for English classes, biology and earth science, Calculus140, Polysci 197, Theatre 203, et al., as well as my personal journals, my drunken notebooks, binders full of laminated papertowels, cigarette packs torn into queer crucifixes and stapled to three-hole-punched cardboard.
It was at that moment that I realized the one thing that I was doing constantly, the thing I backed off during my MFA and the thing I abandoned altogether as a Ph.D. candidate . . . I realized that whatever else I was doing in my life, I was always, also, already writing. I wrote about the subjects for the classes, fictionalized physics, wrote off topic, created worlds in which I was the biology teacher and Dr. M_______ was madly in love with me. I wrote three-line plays and three-page haikus. I started and abandoned novels. I wrote awful things about myself and generous things about exgirlfriends.
At some point, that all fell away. I blame myself, certainly, and at some point, it seemed counterintuitive to begin journaling again. I was a master of fine arts. I was a Ph.D. candidate. I was an adult with children and a mortgage. I had more excuses than I had time to list them.
But I was convinced that I had to start over. I know it was the write decision. So I started running my pen across some pages. Lousy things happened. I wrote about the couch I was sitting on. I wrote about how tall my kids were and how lonely a person might get on a desert island. I wrote about waking up and realizing everything was all a dream. I wrote dreams. I wrote more about the couch, some about the television, a touch about the future of humanity. All boring stuff. All awfully written. All terribly embarrassing. I loved every word.
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