Thinking Great Thoughts

I've been on the road for over a week now--hard to remember, since the first day of my trip was spent in a sleep-deprived daze. I had a two-layover red-eye that got me into BDL at 11 AM last Wednesday. I spent the weekend in Boston hanging out with Berklee students and a high school buddy who now works at a corporate consulting firm, alternately, for the most part. It got me thinking a lot about college.

I never finished college. Explaining why would be long, tedious, circular, and ultimately irrelevant. It isn't a decision I regret an iota. Recently, I have been considering going back to school next fall, largely because next fall I will be 24, and thus (hopefully) eligible for more reasonable student aid. But also because I have things I want to study: music theory, bookkeeping, philosophy, anthropology. I don't have a degree in mind, which was the one mistake I made that I do regret in my going to college the first time around; I just want to learn abundantly.

My attempts to understand this burgeoning desire for schooling has led to a lot of thinking back on previous iterations of myself, their dreams, habits, and ambitions. I landed upon a memory of me at age twelve, when I discovered Joseph Campbell. I was completely inspired by his year of hermitage, locked in a cabin with thousands of books. Such isolation now would be, not impossible, exactly, but hardly desirable. The world is a much faster-paced one than Campbell had to cope with. I haven't returned to that dream for almost a decade; I more or less lost it with the cynicism of the beginning of high school.

I had many things to overcome in the intervening years. I had to face my privilege and live outside it for a time, to reject my parents completely so that I could return knowing what I appreciated about what they had to offer. I had to dismiss the loathing I had been taught for my body and my gender, not just with panicked defensiveness but with steel-cold self-assuredness. I had to care for others so much that I lost myself entirely in order to find myself again completely: Myself, Me, not an extension of anyone else, not an anonymous face in a crowd.

Now I am perhaps ready to become a thinker of great thoughts.

Introductions are in order

This morning I ran across Cara M.'s blog, quite by accident. It is a brand-new blog, raw, without a groove or a theme or a voice beyond its simple manifesto. The rough edges grated on me, but something she said, for whatever reason, really struck home: "Being an aspiring novelist and having a blog seems to be par for the course these days." And isn't that right? So here I am.

I've been trying to get back into writing for years. I say, "get back," but that's somewhat misleading; I feel like I never got into writing properly in the first place. When I was about ten I boldly scribbled out opening scenes before losing interest: a retelling of Mary Reade's story, an Oz-esque tale of a girl who gets lost down a laundry chute, things like that. These ideas never would have gone far; they were careless piles of imagination, without any finesse or research. My attention span also left something to be desired. As I matured, I wrote more, but always collaboratively, mostly in pbp RPGs online. I was too insecure to begin or complete a project of my own. I fully fell out of the habit of writing when I moved into a dorm, in high school; I think the culture shock of moving away from home combined with the sudden lack of privacy to give me a killer case of writer's block.

By the time I dropped out of college a year and a half in, I wasn't even reading anymore. I had a rough outline for a massive urban fantasy novel with four main characters, half a dozen separate races, and  more than its fair share inconsistencies and plot holes. I spent a few years trying to resurrect that story before finally shelving it. This summer, the clouds parted on a number of issues in my life, and with that came a whole new story: a new setting, new characters, and a new tone. It was simpler, more original, and on a smaller scale, the perfect combination of more promising and less ambitious. I leapt on it like a starving cat. I even did some writing longhand, something I hadn't tried since those early days of stories about pirates and fairy-land.

As summer drew to a close, I started to lose momentum; work was picking up, travel was ending, and I was sinking back into the depression that had plagued me before. Examining this trend, I realized that, for writing at least, the honey-moon was over. If I wanted this story to happen, I was going to have to do some actual work.

That meant writing again, something I hadn't done deliberately since leaving school. I'm amazed at how difficult a habit it is to return to. I've tried various tricks--morning pages, NaNoWriMo, keeping a journal--but no dice; I couldn't stick with it. Finally, it occurred to me that I might be suffering from a lack of an audience. All those tactics felt totally masturbatory, and my self-disgust fueled my much-diminished writer's block. I don't know why, since no one is going to read this blog right away, but it feels somehow different. And it must be, a little, seeing as how I just hammered out 500+ words of coherent discussion. I even managed some semblance of the 5-paragraph format I learned in school. Gods help me, I can't escape. I guess we'll see how this goes.