Old notebooks
A couple of weeks ago my parents came over for dinner. I had emailed them a newspaper column about a Baby Boomer cleaning out decades of her own junk from her mom's house in preparation for a move to a retirement home. Apparently that inspired my mom to empty the basement of my stuff, because she brought me a box of old notebooks from college. After they left, I sat down and went through them.
I had thought it would be a fun little trip down memory lane, and in some ways it was. For whatever reason I had saved my notes from pretty much every class I took in college, and it was entertaining to flip through them and see not only what I'd been studying but also what I was writing in the margins during lecture. I also apparently saved almost all of the papers I wrote.
That was where the nostalgia veered toward the depressing. I remembered writing all those papers, including the ones that drove me crazy. After a decade I could still tell you which ones reduced me to tearful phone calls home and hysterical crying jags in the corner of my room because I could just not get started, the one that I wrote in the art library because I couldn't get anything done at home and the one I finished up in the dorm computer lab minutes before it was due.
And because I saved the final, graded papers, I also got to revisit the comments that my favorite professor wrote on a number of them, some of which were over-the-top complimentary. I remembered her nominating me for a scholarship based on one of them, but I didn't remember quite the extent of her praise. And I read the papers again and thought, yeah, these were pretty good after all.
To complete the emotional flogging, I also had saved everything from the creative writing classes I took freshman and sophomore year, before I completely lost confidence in my writing. Not just the finished products (also complete with comments), but also the journal I kept for class, full of false starts and, increasingly, panicked meta-analysis--writing about why I wasn't writing, or what my characters weren't doing.
A normal person would probably have read this stuff, laughed fondly, and moved on. (OK, a normal person probably wouldn't have saved it in the first place.) I, of course, was awake all night thinking about how the person I was then became the person I am today. And of course it was all framed as, "I was smart then. I was a good writer then."
I had thought maybe the little flashback would inspire me to start writing more, but instead it's had the opposite effect. I've been thinking a lot about those old stories, but when it comes to creating anything new, I haven't been able to focus.
I started writing something the other day about my experience sitting next to an apparently schizophrenic man in church last Sunday, but I didn't get very far. I'm officially the least productive member of the creative writing club at this point, which is pretty sad since I'm the resident authority figure.
This week I'm going to a conference in Seattle. Hopefully the change of scenery will do me good, or I'll have some kind of funny adventure or encounter that will inspire me.
I had thought it would be a fun little trip down memory lane, and in some ways it was. For whatever reason I had saved my notes from pretty much every class I took in college, and it was entertaining to flip through them and see not only what I'd been studying but also what I was writing in the margins during lecture. I also apparently saved almost all of the papers I wrote.
That was where the nostalgia veered toward the depressing. I remembered writing all those papers, including the ones that drove me crazy. After a decade I could still tell you which ones reduced me to tearful phone calls home and hysterical crying jags in the corner of my room because I could just not get started, the one that I wrote in the art library because I couldn't get anything done at home and the one I finished up in the dorm computer lab minutes before it was due.
And because I saved the final, graded papers, I also got to revisit the comments that my favorite professor wrote on a number of them, some of which were over-the-top complimentary. I remembered her nominating me for a scholarship based on one of them, but I didn't remember quite the extent of her praise. And I read the papers again and thought, yeah, these were pretty good after all.
To complete the emotional flogging, I also had saved everything from the creative writing classes I took freshman and sophomore year, before I completely lost confidence in my writing. Not just the finished products (also complete with comments), but also the journal I kept for class, full of false starts and, increasingly, panicked meta-analysis--writing about why I wasn't writing, or what my characters weren't doing.
A normal person would probably have read this stuff, laughed fondly, and moved on. (OK, a normal person probably wouldn't have saved it in the first place.) I, of course, was awake all night thinking about how the person I was then became the person I am today. And of course it was all framed as, "I was smart then. I was a good writer then."
I had thought maybe the little flashback would inspire me to start writing more, but instead it's had the opposite effect. I've been thinking a lot about those old stories, but when it comes to creating anything new, I haven't been able to focus.
I started writing something the other day about my experience sitting next to an apparently schizophrenic man in church last Sunday, but I didn't get very far. I'm officially the least productive member of the creative writing club at this point, which is pretty sad since I'm the resident authority figure.
This week I'm going to a conference in Seattle. Hopefully the change of scenery will do me good, or I'll have some kind of funny adventure or encounter that will inspire me.
posted by Madame Defarge at 8:39 PM
2 Comments:
Why do you want to write?
A) Because I like the mental image of myself as a writer.
B) Because I enjoy it when I'm actually doing it, not putting pressure on myself because I'm not doing it.
C) Because even with the most personal stuff and the stuff that makes me sad and nostalgic and embarrassed, I love going back and reading what I wrote as another, earlier version of myself.
D) Because, although I feel weird admitting it, I think I'm good at it.
E) All of the above.
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