(Wanna-be-)Writer’s Block
It’s time to start on my second short story of the semester for this writing class I’m taking, and after a couple hours of sitting in front of my computer typing kee-rap yesterday, it occurs to me that everything I think to write about this early in my renewed Attempt at Writing stage in life, will necessarily be a cliché.
I don’t really have an interesting childhood to go back and dig around in. Flannery O’Conner said something like "If you survived childhood, you have at least 5 novels in you." I cannot fathom five novels about growing up middle class and white and average in suburban Pittsburgh, though; at least, not right now, as I stare down the ceaseless blinking of the cursor.
In college, I had a roommate who was from the rural swamps of North Carolina. She had a whole passel of relatives and ancestors who set one another on fire and hanged themselves and escaped floods -- and she was a damn fine writer, besides.
Back in grade school, I would write about girls who flew to new planets in cardboard rocket-ships powered by grape juice. I had a whole literary series about the zany adventures of a cat named Frisky. I was also a better liar back then. I could lie with a straight face. I could fool anyone. Of course, maybe I just believed this to be the case. I was, after all, eight years old.
For some reason, by college, I had stopped writing. I took a gander at my new Swamp-Genius writer-friend, considered my own bland background, and said, "Okay, so she writes. What will be my thing?" And I made my thing activism and anthropology and philosophy and women’s studies and insert-Alice’s-major-of-the-month here. I lived as if I was the original and only earnest shaggeddy armpit-haired/fist-in-the-air’ed university student.
And I had a great time, but the funny thing is that while I was all this countercultural blah-de-blah, I still was so afraid of conflict that I stopped doing
one thing I loved to do, just because I didn’t want to compete with my friend. Identity is a strange thing. It’s malleable. And often by forces you’d
least expect. Usually inside your own damn self, right?
It’s time to start on my second short story of the semester for this writing class I’m taking, and after a couple hours of sitting in front of my computer typing kee-rap yesterday, it occurs to me that everything I think to write about this early in my renewed Attempt at Writing stage in life, will necessarily be a cliché.
I don’t really have an interesting childhood to go back and dig around in. Flannery O’Conner said something like "If you survived childhood, you have at least 5 novels in you." I cannot fathom five novels about growing up middle class and white and average in suburban Pittsburgh, though; at least, not right now, as I stare down the ceaseless blinking of the cursor.
In college, I had a roommate who was from the rural swamps of North Carolina. She had a whole passel of relatives and ancestors who set one another on fire and hanged themselves and escaped floods -- and she was a damn fine writer, besides.
Back in grade school, I would write about girls who flew to new planets in cardboard rocket-ships powered by grape juice. I had a whole literary series about the zany adventures of a cat named Frisky. I was also a better liar back then. I could lie with a straight face. I could fool anyone. Of course, maybe I just believed this to be the case. I was, after all, eight years old.
For some reason, by college, I had stopped writing. I took a gander at my new Swamp-Genius writer-friend, considered my own bland background, and said, "Okay, so she writes. What will be my thing?" And I made my thing activism and anthropology and philosophy and women’s studies and insert-Alice’s-major-of-the-month here. I lived as if I was the original and only earnest shaggeddy armpit-haired/fist-in-the-air’ed university student.
And I had a great time, but the funny thing is that while I was all this countercultural blah-de-blah, I still was so afraid of conflict that I stopped doing
one thing I loved to do, just because I didn’t want to compete with my friend. Identity is a strange thing. It’s malleable. And often by forces you’d
least expect. Usually inside your own damn self, right?
posted by Alice at 4:51 AM
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