Track 2: Expectations
I never thought I would really have a blog; like an actual written online blog where I write consecutive entries for a maybe public audience. My experience with blogging extends short of daily tumblr-ing and the occasional journal entry in a $10 Wal-Mart notebook. So, this is a new experience entirely. Here, I am entering uncharted territory for somebody like me--a writer who is wholeheartedly convinced that she has nothing good to say.
When I was a child, I read everything I could get my hands on from the Bristol Public Library. Mystery, horror-lit, humor, kid fiction, even YA books that had appealing covers and cool titles. I wanted to explore the worlds Stephen King crafted, and be immersed in all things adult when it came to books. Those authors, they had something to say, and they said it well. While I was too young to read Stephen King at 12 and 13, I knew he was a genius writer, and I wanted to be just like him. But I wanted to be like R.L. Stine, too. I wanted to be like Barbara Parks and Judy Blume, and soon, like Kevin Brooks and Laurie Halse Anderson and John Green and Sarah Dessen. I admit it, I was hooked on contemporary YA lit, and every book I read was wonderful.
Before long, I was telling my parents I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say the things I felt and knew and wanted to shout, and I wasn't going to be afraid to be bold, to be published. I wanted to take on the world.
Much has changed since my childhood. I'm twenty, and I'm pretty terrified. I'm worried most of the time about how "good" my work is. Now that I'm approaching college graduation, I wonder how I'm possibly going to make it in the world as a writer. I know I have things to say, but, I don't read nearly as much anymore as I used to, and, to be honest, that's the place in which I felt the most powerful. The more books I read, the more I wrote myself. I filled notebooks, wanted to buy expensive pens and stationary just to practice my autograph for the next "Great American Novel." Thanks, mom, for instilling in me the knowledge of that art, and very far away dream.
I had a professor in my first year of college who told my creative writing seminar class, "Stop getting in the way of your writing. Let it do itself." And I really, I mean really get in the way. If my writing is a line of traffic on the Mass Pike, I am one of ten bulldozers and a horde of 2-ton construction gadgets blocking the morning commute and the pre-office donuts and cappuccino runs. I don't let anything I say stand for itself. I don't let it do the work I know it can do. I say "I" too much at the start of every sentence. I used to count how many sentences that I wrote started with "I" in any particular piece, and would strike a large tally in ink over every one, determined to either use a different letter to float there, or find a better introductory word. Indelibly, I've started a thought with "I" 15 times so far in this post. Either I'm extremely narcissistic, or just unoriginal.
Even though I'm still in college, and still practically a kid, I can't help but feel like I should be doing better. Just tonight, my mother sent me a link to an article in the local paper back home that a girl I went to high school with wrote. She's a columnist for The Observer. A columnist, and she is one grade below me, attending the least liberal arts school in New England, and she has a column. Once, when I was a senior in high school, I ran an advice column in the school paper where I answered questions submitted anonymously to an English teacher's mailbox. Twice my answers were published, the column placed beside my stunningly gross photo, posing in a green sweatshirt while pretending to remove a piece of paper from the box. Two issues printed my column before I graduated. That, friends, is the extent of column writing I've done. This girl is making a living out of her dorm room writing aesthetic pieces to The Observer, and, I am about experienced enough to observe her.
What if, in the words of Neil Gaiman, I can't make good art? What if I just can't do it. What if I write, and write, and edit, and cut, and paste, and edit, and add, and trim, and fatten the piece like a pig for slaughter until I think it's totally finished, and then, it's not. I'll never be as good as Ron Currie Jr. or Nic Sheff, and I will never quite understand what Professor Teal meant when he said "get out of the way." I only know how to direct the traffic.
So, I think I want to start getting out of the way for once. I want to stay on track, working upward and forward until I am what I want to be, until the work is fit to bursting with electricity and complexity and sagacity. Full steam, ahead.
When I was a child, I read everything I could get my hands on from the Bristol Public Library. Mystery, horror-lit, humor, kid fiction, even YA books that had appealing covers and cool titles. I wanted to explore the worlds Stephen King crafted, and be immersed in all things adult when it came to books. Those authors, they had something to say, and they said it well. While I was too young to read Stephen King at 12 and 13, I knew he was a genius writer, and I wanted to be just like him. But I wanted to be like R.L. Stine, too. I wanted to be like Barbara Parks and Judy Blume, and soon, like Kevin Brooks and Laurie Halse Anderson and John Green and Sarah Dessen. I admit it, I was hooked on contemporary YA lit, and every book I read was wonderful.
Before long, I was telling my parents I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say the things I felt and knew and wanted to shout, and I wasn't going to be afraid to be bold, to be published. I wanted to take on the world.
Much has changed since my childhood. I'm twenty, and I'm pretty terrified. I'm worried most of the time about how "good" my work is. Now that I'm approaching college graduation, I wonder how I'm possibly going to make it in the world as a writer. I know I have things to say, but, I don't read nearly as much anymore as I used to, and, to be honest, that's the place in which I felt the most powerful. The more books I read, the more I wrote myself. I filled notebooks, wanted to buy expensive pens and stationary just to practice my autograph for the next "Great American Novel." Thanks, mom, for instilling in me the knowledge of that art, and very far away dream.
I had a professor in my first year of college who told my creative writing seminar class, "Stop getting in the way of your writing. Let it do itself." And I really, I mean really get in the way. If my writing is a line of traffic on the Mass Pike, I am one of ten bulldozers and a horde of 2-ton construction gadgets blocking the morning commute and the pre-office donuts and cappuccino runs. I don't let anything I say stand for itself. I don't let it do the work I know it can do. I say "I" too much at the start of every sentence. I used to count how many sentences that I wrote started with "I" in any particular piece, and would strike a large tally in ink over every one, determined to either use a different letter to float there, or find a better introductory word. Indelibly, I've started a thought with "I" 15 times so far in this post. Either I'm extremely narcissistic, or just unoriginal.
Even though I'm still in college, and still practically a kid, I can't help but feel like I should be doing better. Just tonight, my mother sent me a link to an article in the local paper back home that a girl I went to high school with wrote. She's a columnist for The Observer. A columnist, and she is one grade below me, attending the least liberal arts school in New England, and she has a column. Once, when I was a senior in high school, I ran an advice column in the school paper where I answered questions submitted anonymously to an English teacher's mailbox. Twice my answers were published, the column placed beside my stunningly gross photo, posing in a green sweatshirt while pretending to remove a piece of paper from the box. Two issues printed my column before I graduated. That, friends, is the extent of column writing I've done. This girl is making a living out of her dorm room writing aesthetic pieces to The Observer, and, I am about experienced enough to observe her.
What if, in the words of Neil Gaiman, I can't make good art? What if I just can't do it. What if I write, and write, and edit, and cut, and paste, and edit, and add, and trim, and fatten the piece like a pig for slaughter until I think it's totally finished, and then, it's not. I'll never be as good as Ron Currie Jr. or Nic Sheff, and I will never quite understand what Professor Teal meant when he said "get out of the way." I only know how to direct the traffic.
So, I think I want to start getting out of the way for once. I want to stay on track, working upward and forward until I am what I want to be, until the work is fit to bursting with electricity and complexity and sagacity. Full steam, ahead.
This is WONDERFUL
ReplyDeleteThanks, mom!
ReplyDelete