My Younger Self Ponders...

"How can I be a writer when nothing has happened to me yet?"

I asked myself this in my journal September 10, 2006 while in my hovel of a studio in New York. Today, this question means more to me than I could have imagined when I wrote it. At the time, I had just returned to New York from Toronto, where I'd attended a party thrown by the One Organization. I wrote in my journal that I wanted to finish school early and go to Africa to "help out," a vague dream, but one I made in earnest, very much inspired by what I had recently seen. I thought that if I went to Africa, I could do some good and then write about it. Get one of those "life experiences" people always think they need.

This question struck me because it seems almost ridiculous to me now, since I have learned that writing is not entirely about subject matter, but how one handles his or her material. At that point in my writing life (about a month in, officially, if I count the beginning of grad school as a starting point), I had no instruction on craft, or what story really is. What it can be.

Not that I am a wise old writer two years and change (ooh, double meaning) later, but, because I have learned that pretty much everything that happens to us is fodder for writing, I look back on this question almost ruefully. So much tangibly happened to me already when I wrote that question: milestones like my parents' divorce and moving across the country, associations with certain groups and activities like belonging to a sorority, going to an eccentrically-run summer camp, and working at an entertainment magazine.

While I lived in New York, I was too caught up in trying to build some kind of idealized life. I always looking for the next job, the next trip, even the next day, so much so that I think missed much of what was in front of me on a daily basis. So much did happen, even in those seven months in the city, but it took me some time to realize what actually took place.

I also wrote this when I was in New York: I don’t want waste each day by just trying to get through it. We can’t always worry about tomorrow, next week, next year—feverishly churning the gears in our brains to calculate the what-ifs. Envisioning realities that may or may not materialize. It’s too hard to just try to get through each day until the goal is reached, because goals, and dreams, fade, leave, and die. If I always live for tomorrow, yet tomorrow depends on today, how can tomorrow even happen?

It's almost like I have to just live, accept what comes at me, and write down everything that seems important. Then, unearth it later. As I have learned from my professors and classmates at USC, story is not simply what happens to us, but what we think about what happens to us. It is how we relate to that material with the tools of distance, time, and maturity that give us the deeper meaning and understanding. So that we can see, through writing, what it all really means. So we can understand what happened.