Week 1, Part 1. Writer's Autobiography as a Writer

First Person:

My strength has always laid in reading, not writing.  Turned off from an early age to sports and physical activity by the catcalls of peers on the playground and during gym class, I spent my summers belly-down, devouring books by the pile, sucked into other worlds much more interesting than my own.  Writing was for doing homework assignments, working on essays, sweating over during tests.  Writing never seemed to have the potential for, well, fun.

But my love affair with books was undeniable.  And as I grew older, my palate for higher quality writing, less "fluff" if you will, grew as well.  I began to notice nuances, creative details, and recognized what was going to be a five star meal of a book and what was going to be just a fast food one.  I began to demand more from my beloved authors.  I started to grow out of writers that I had followed religiously, reading more outside my usual scope.

I never really did dabble in what could be called writing.  I had ideas that I would occasionally jot down, thinking wistfully of how nice it would be to develop them into a story some day, but never feeling satisfied with my ability (real or imagined).  Still, as my love of books grew more refined, so did my interest in writing and writing styles.  Finally, in college I had the opportunity to take a creative fiction writing class.  I wanted to see if there was a joy in writing as well, so I signed up as soon as I was able to.

My teacher was wonderful.  She could have been teaching politics, geology, or alpaca sweater knitting and I still would have adored her.  She just had one of those sparkling personalities that drew everyone to her.  And that was really good, because I was definitely a hesitant writer.  Having a friendly face in a sea of critics helped draw me out of my shell some.

I've always been incredibly shy about showing to others what little writing I've created.  Perhaps it's because I was never in the habit of producing it regularly.  Drawing - now that's something I'm comfortable with.  I'm not a Pablo Picasso or a Monet when it comes to art, but I've been doing it since I was little, and somehow I've always been able to show it to others and take constructive criticism well.  I could analyze my art with a critical, not judgmental, eye and feel satisfied with what I saw.  But writing...  Showing others my writing always felt like undressing in front of someone for the first time.  And even if they honestly liked what they saw, I could somehow never quite believe them.  Any criticism felt like fiery "JUDGEMENT".  Like they were commenting on me, not some piece of paper with words on it.

Being in the creative writing class helped.  I was able to transition my thinking a bit more, bring in those feelings I had from presenting my art to presenting my writing.  I suppose the older I get the more this is the case for many other things, too.  But there is still that sense of shyness, that hesitancy.  And part of me wants to keep my writing secret.  Like the little treasure in your pocket that only you know about.  But there has always been a joy in sharing my drawings with others, no matter how rough or lacking they have been.  And I'd like to find that joy with writing as well.  The ideas that pass through my mind every day like fish - I want to catch them and display them.  It seems such a waste to let so many ideas fade back into the murky depths of my mind.

Second Person:

You have this pressing need to write in a journal every day.  For some reason, you have decided that you need to do this.  Years later, you can't really figure out why it was so important to do so.  It just was.  You have this pressing need, but you don't really think about your personality first before diving into this latest project.  You have this vision of perfection.  You're in middle school, so you can't really let things go at this age, you can't figure out it would be SO much easier if you just yielded to the inevitable.

So.  It has been decided that you will write in your journal EVERY night, diligently, and you will even mark down the start and end time of each entry.  And you will feel greatly disappointed in yourself and judge yourself heavily if you miss even one entry.  And as a result you hate journaling and you last perhaps two months before everything fizzles out.  Oh, sure, you come back to it now and again.  You have a pretty good run when you're in high school, but it's not until years later that you can even stand to pick up a journal, let alone write in one.

After years of collecting a handful of pretty but shamefully EMPTY journals, you find yourself killing time in a department store in Japan.  There's a tiny notebook, delightfully thin and just the right size for your purse, on one of the shelves in the department store.  It has a design of photographed cherries.  Really plain compared to other journals, but perhaps less intimidating because it would be so easy to fill one up.  On a whim, you decide to buy it.  All these years you wanted to be in the habit of journaling.  You wanted to write about your stresses, your major life changes, your fun little ideas that you never seem to write down in time before they fade and disappear, and now here's your chance.  Again.

THIS time, you are going to do it differently, you decide.  This time you are going to be mindful of your personality.  You aren't the type to just sit and write every night.  It didn't work for you in the past and you don't see it suddenly working for you now.  And if you leave it by your bed stand, it will probably go largely ignored.  This time, you will keep it in your purse, readily available when you need it.  And no more psychotic rules about the time you wrote an entry, or how long it was.  Well, you will keep writing the dates.  You can't lose all sense of order, can you?!

So, you do.  You keep the journal handy with you.  You don't write in it every day, and you let it go.  That's okay.  You find that it's fun to write about something during a boring work meeting (and let's face it, there are many of those in the Japanese work place).  You can doodle art while waiting for a doctor's appointment.  You can pull it out and remind yourself to pick up dish detergent before you forget.  And you can write all those wonderful ideas that had always been slipping away, and rest well at night knowing that even if you never act on those ideas, at least they are locked somewhere safe.

You begin to enjoy the presence of your journal.  You carefully select ones that fit in your purse.  Each journal is unique, is given special reverence.  You start writing haiku on a regular basis, and enjoy flipping through older journals to re-read them or laugh at a random doodle.

You find your rhythm with your journals, and although it occasionally distresses you that you don't write in them often enough (oh dear perfectionist, will you clutch in desperation eternally?), you find peace in them.  You wish you could go back in time and tell that sad middle school girl frantically checking and recording the time in her little green notebook that "it's okay.  You'll get there eventually."

Third Person:

She never really cared about writing that much.  Well, maybe a little, but she didn't really have confidence in hers.  And no one ever really asked much from her for writing. Unless we're talking about homework writing, which we're not.

In 8th grade she had a new English teacher.  The teacher was new to town, too.  She was actually this student's neighbor - ugh, is it a good thing or a bad thing to have a teacher as a neighbor when in middle school?

This teacher was new to teaching as well.  She was kind, but sometimes suddenly sharp and angry with the students.  The student probably feared her more than she loved her.  Like someone receiving a loving pat, but cringing in anticipation of the slap.  But that's too harsh an assessment of this teacher.  She really wasn't that bad, this was just a skewed view through a young middle school student's lens.

And the teacher's passion for her subject showed.  She tried to be creative with her teaching and she tried to get students interested in their subject.  The student's memory is faded now about those classes, but she still remembers one writing assignment.  THE writing assignment, that stuck with her for all these years.

Students had to write a creative fiction piece.  This student in particular loved science fiction and fantasy.  She loved it more than any other genre.  She always had ideas whirling in her mind, and now she had an assignment to give some of those ideas direction.

She always worried about the planet, state of affairs with the environment, that kind of thing.  So she wrote using that and her love of science fiction, and she came up with an unusual story.  Creative, or at least she hoped.  She was proud of her work.  Certainly it wasn't the first fiction story she had written, but it was the first she had poured her heart and soul into.

In the story, babies were in a laboratory, hooked up to machines. Robots clicked and whirred, moving about, feeding the children, injecting them periodically with mysterious chemicals.  The chemicals must have had a purpose though, because the babies' growth increased abnormally.  They began to move about the room.  They began to show signs of faster-than-normal intelligence.  They began to develop their own language.

Months later these now young children traveled around the laboratory and found different floors with different purposes - plants and animals being raised by machines, equipment running in different rooms.  Finally the children found a video of a man speaking, and after several weeks (with their rapid-growth intelligence) they were able to translate the video.  The man said that there had been many wars and the Earth had been completely devastated, now void of any life.  He explained that the children were in a secret laboratory deep underground.  They were left with the very important task of reseeding the earth, sending out plants and animals to once again cover the world.  And to repopulate the planet with people once again.

In the end the children went to the surface, saw the emptiness, the devastation.  They decided they would reseed the plants and raise the animals.  But they would not repopulate the earth.  The sins of their ancestors was too great, and the species would die with them.

Her teacher liked her story.  She blushed with pride at her teacher's praise.  And balked when her teacher suggested she submit the story to a young adult's journal, for a writing competition posted there.  There was prize money to be had, but the thought of being published is what drew the student.  She was nervous, but she wanted to try it.  She had real pride in her story and thought that she might have a chance.

After (characteristically) scrambling to get her entry ready in time and generally causing her parents and teacher distress, she submitted her work.  And waited, and waited.  Finally, the story came back in the mail. It was covered in red ink.  All the corrections that could have, should have been made were there for her to see.  And a note at the bottom thanking her for her entry and informing her that she hadn't won.

When the winning entry was released in the journal, she read it.  It was about some troubled boy who liked to soothe his inner darkness by holding his head in a flushing toilet and laying on the ground and snorting salt.  Those who get published, she reflected, have to write about something dark in order to do so (she didn't, until many years later, make the connection that her story was also perhaps a bit dark as well).  She felt sad, and disappointed.  That little fire that had started to grow quickly went out.  She liked writing, but it wasn't something that she could feel passionate about.  So she gave it up.  And she didn't write again until many years later, in college.