And So It Begins

It's best to read that title the way Mr. Fox says it in Fantastic Mr. Fox. Because that's how it sounds in my head. Here's my favorite line from that movie:

"Redemption? Sure. But in the end he's just another dead rat in a garbage can behind a Chinese restaurant."

That has little to nothing to do with what I'm about to write about, so best not to try and make a connection.

For those of you who don't know my official moving date is September 1, meaning I have less than two weeks to get the tangible elements of my life in some kind of order. I made a pretty detailed To-Do list this past weekend, the first item on the list being "Make To-Do List." So at least I got to check off that one. I divided my list into four sections, one of them completely dedicated to the cleaning of/sorting of/purging of my room, a terrifying feat I've been putting off since we moved into this house 10  years ago. That sub-section was then split into a list of five, each item being a different part of my room that I felt needed the most individual attention. The number one slot went to the bookshelf and pile of crap next to the bookshelf, or as I like to call this area, "the fire hazard." Thank God there's a push to go paperless, because I am one of the assholes who only drafts stories with ink in notebooks and puts hexes on Kindles. This corner of my room is proof of that. The books are making the move with me, but that stack of crap had to be downsized, biggest reason being I knew just how many embarrassing creative attempts were in there.

Some a dat stack. 

Now as many know, especially artists of any kind, we all have artistic endeavors of which we are not proud. Well, maybe proud is not the correct word. We should all have pride in our efforts. But there are certainly drafts and recordings and sketches that we pray will never see the light of day. Yes, they have  probably served as a foundation for something better, but the actual first attempt at converting emotion to art is rough. The above picture is the rough stuff. The oh my god, noooo stuff. The boys who do not love me so I really have a lot of feelings right now stuff. The I'm 13 and alt music is my life and nobody understands me stuff. There was just an overwhelming amount of stuff and I went through all of it. 

Some notebooks were entirely dedicated to free writing: words I could have put in my diary but for whatever reason, I needed notebook paper. Those pieces were difficult because the emotion was raw but I was still trying to write with a hint of presentation. It was like I deemed my thoughts and feelings insignificant so I needed to amp up the pageantry just a touch in order to make them valuable. But to whom? I don't know, but I was looking for something. I have a rule about my diaries: creative writing never, ever, ever goes in them. Yes, we can argue about creativity of style and language and what not, but ultimately the diary exists for thoughts and nothing else, so it's very interesting that I felt compelled to put certain things in spiral notebooks. I think that, even at 15, I was aware of the artifice. 

Then there were binders and notebooks dedicated to various pieces of dialogue. Some were a part of larger script ideas, others had clearly been jotted down while sitting in a high school classroom. I found a list of 10 different script ideas. None of this stuff was horrible, which surprised me. A lot of these dialogue pieces had been inspired by people, though, and thinking about the person who at one time made you feel something is very strange and not super awesome. I think it takes a lot of maturity to transition from asking who inspired this? to what inspired this? It is so easy to point a finger and say "YOU did this to me" or "how could YOU?" But when we start thinking about themes, issues--politics, lying, family dynamics, etc.-- the writing becomes something else. It takes a long, long time to learn to extract how you feel about being cheated on and the concept of cheating as opposed to what you think of the cheater. Or the lover, or the liar, or the teacher or whomever introduced you to the feeling you wanted to express when you wrote it down. I think we should always let people inspire us as long as we recognize what is being inspired. Oh, and then use that person as an outline for a character. You can't let that kind of material go to waste. Somebody taught you how to say "fuck you" but somebody else made you say it with feeling. 

Anyway. Among the pages and dialogue and stories and lists of ideas, I was really surprised at how much of that material is still being used when I write. So even though I threw away all of it, I am definitely still using a lot of those one-liners and situations and characters and what not. Even if they were written in notebooks that look like this: 

Artfully styled in the year 2000. There is a big ass

picture of NSync on the back. 

My senior thesis project was a creative writing collection. There was all sorts of stuff crammed in there: stories, monologues, lists, scenes. It's very cool and very humbling to see that so much of that was easily 15 years in the making. That stack of notebooks and binders in the picture above? It was basically condensed into 140 pages. That's a lot of editing. Now I write everything on yellow legal pads or in small Moleskin notebooks. I'm interested to see how large that stack will get until it's ripped apart and downsized. 

And as for the diaries. Well.

Where are you in this stack? Jk! But seriously. 

24 individual hard covered journals. Nearly 16 years. Each entry including a date, a salutation, and a signature. Black ink only. You want to know why I have such a good memory? I write it down. And from all those pages you see above, there is the rawness and newness that stories don't get. These are a huge part of my writing process because I need the fuel to start the machine. In my final English class of my college career I read an essay in which I mentioned that I write about every new person I meet. Well, here are the records. 

Writing has propelled me to where I am now. Ironic, as I am unemployed and wading through post graduate life and trying to navigate the "where" and the "now." I know for a fact that there are people who read the previous sentence and think I'm a loser or I'm unmotivated or I wasted so much money on college or I'm making a huge mistake or some variation of those. And that's okay. I made this decision and I'm really happy about it. I'm terrified, yes, but I'm happy. Having a skill that is based in creativity gives people the idea that you are either out of touch with reality or you just don't care to ever be a part of reality. But I really like to write. Let's see what happens. 

Here's some advice I really like: 

"Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about." -Colin Nissan, "The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do." 

Check out the full article here. 

And here's something I love: 

"How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this” and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And “if your Nerve, deny you –,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “go above your Nerve.” Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig." -Sugar (Cheryl Strayed), Dear Sugar #48, "Write Like a Motherfucker." 

You should definitely read the full piece here.

I think I should return to my To-Do list,  the one that has not decreased as the day has gone by but instead mocked me from afar. I made it, though, so really I did it to myself. All of this stuff I'm getting rid of and being afraid of and looking forward to: I did that to myself. But there's something kind of fantastic about that, isn't there?