Craft

While trying to track down a copy of this month’s book club selection, and for the first time since its launch, I wished I had a Kindle.  I don’t know enough about e-readers to know if having one would have made accessing the book easier or cheaper, but I assumed it did.  With that being said, I’m over it, and glad to still have shelves cluttered with books. 

             

Thinking about books and reading inevitably leads me to think about writing.  Journaling and blogging aside, I used to write.  I wrote short stories, attempted novels, and even penned some pretty pitiful poetry.  It wasn’t just something to do as an expressive teenager; I majored in it as an undergrad.  I invested money in books and magazines about the craft, went to a writer’s conference, submitted a few pieces to various publications, and thought for a time that this was my true path.  Then, right around the time I entered grad school, I stopped following that path.  I even wrote about it (of course):

…Today I opened a bound notebook and read writing exercises I completed, short story and novel ideas, and journal entries proclaiming my life’s goal to be a published novelist.  …[T]hey reflected ideas and ambitions from 2000 and 2001.  When I look back over the past eight years, I am convinced that I have not changed in all that time, because I define who I am by what I do.  I go to work, I work out, and I read.  Broken down that simply, I have been stagnant for almost a decade. 

However, that’s not true.  This notebook proves that an essential part of me is different.  I no longer yearn to be a published novelist or short story writer.  For twenty years this had been my direction.  I wrote off and on for years, but even during the off periods, I still believed in what I wanted to do.  Well, I haven’t written fiction in about three years, but this is not an off period.  I’ve consciously let the dream go…and I’m okay with that. 

That was in 2009, and I’ve been busy enough with grad school and the job search that I haven’t thought much on the fact that I don’t write stories anymore.  I did think about writing, and was pleased when I discovered that the information profession has a need for, and even an expectation of, its members to publish.  And those essays that are so requisite in classroom learning?  I was most definitely in my own strange little heaven there. 

            

Expository writing, however, isn’t what I had hung my hat on all those years, and in the past week, I’ve rediscovered a yen for fiction and fancy craft.  I want to revisit some of my old work and try my hand at new ideas.  Years ago I subscribed to an electronic newsletter of a journal that publishes short stories and since I have never unsubscribed, I got an email this week announcing a new writer’s contest that I’m seriously considering entering (deadline is May 31, so some polished old work might have to do).

So May just may become a theme month in terms of blog posts, like “The Writer’s Spirit” or some such nonsense.  With that in mind, I struggled with how to craft this first post.  I thought about stand-out moments in my writing past, evidence that it was something important to me, and I thought of Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury.  I remember sitting in study hall, gripping those pages tightly, in awe at how he could so accurately echo everything I had felt at the time.  I still have the book, a little worn around the edges, whole passages highlighted or underlined.  In my hands, the book almost feels supple, like worn leather.  One look and I see a book well-used and well-loved.  I’m not sure a Kindle can do that.