Writing…writing…I’m a writer…I used to be a writer….I used to write! Ah! Memories!…of being connected to something deeper than the daily life I live! To sit with myself and the words on the screen, creating, organizing sentences, editing and thinking, my coffee and snacks around me, the word count increasing, the silence…
It’s been a few months since I sat down at my laptop – it’s a fresh new one now, a MacBook Air! – and spent some time. Moving to a new city has been a busy and destabilizing experience after being settled for ten years…Boxes to unpack and organize where on earth the contents would go (omg, more books????).
I opened some boxes and wondered why I packed what I did. Much went out to the curb on garbage day. A cleansing and purging experience, moving is…
But just the other day, after taking a few weeks break, after thinking I’d unpacked everything that was essential to life, I pulled out one more box…just to see what was inside…just to get it off the floor…
Notebooks. Lots of them. And stories. From my creative writing course a few years ago. And what an interesting read they were! The thoughts I had recorded onto the paper, in the messiest handwriting ever, the scenes I intended to construct a novel with, the emotional wrestling I was going through at the time…
The notebooks are chaotic. A madwoman writing – no, complaining and screaming the injustices of predicaments that were no ones fault and had no resolutions! I thought, if these books survive my death and someone finds them, what on earth would they think??? But, I’m keeping them.
The truth is, the notebooks have inspired me – not exactly to continue on with the random threads, or to organize those particular thoughts into a coherent best selling novel that will make me rich – but to keep writing. Something happened to me as I flipped through those pages. I relaxed into a mode of some kind, my brain began to work in familiar patterns, I grew comfortable in my own skin. I needed those notebooks, and they are now out of their box and handy. I want to write again. It’s time.
I thank the handwritten scribbles and circled ideas in the margin, the doodle in the top right hand corner, the arrows drawn up down and all around as I edited the order of my thoughts (no! this should go here!)
Page after page fills my head with fresh imagination and storylines that will now begin a new notebook – another that I’m hoping will make enough sense to become that long awaited novel.
No harm in thinking out of the box right?
