Free-form Writing

Tonight I’ll do an exercise in free-form writing. I could come up with many different subjects to write about, but I want to just open the conduits. On Sunday an obituary caught my eye. It was about a 45-year-old woman who died of a brain aneurysm, and who recently had an essay published in the literary magazine Shenandoah. The obituary also made mention of Gettysburg Review. So I looked them up on the internet and discovered, or rediscovered, the world of small-press literary magazines. I remember them from college, or particularly well-stocked newsstands, and have looked through them on occasion, but never really picked one up and read it carefully. Reading the submission requirements on some of them, you can tell that tons of people are hopefully submitting their most heartfelt writings, and the people who read the submissions have had to slog through what they have felt was a lot of crap. Reading that none of them accept anything that’s been published in any medium made me feel like, oh shit, I’ve already put my best stuff on my blog, and used up some of the subjects that I feel the impulse to write about most strongly, and now I’ll have to scrape up other stuff if I have any hope of being published in a literary magazine. What if my well is about to run dry? The obituary said this woman’s essay in Shenandoah, titled "Ugly", about her having felt unattractive her whole life, garnered calls from a couple of literary agents wanting her to write a book. Wow, I thought.

But the thing is, this is kind of what I envisioned happening when I started my blog. I figured somewhere in the back of my head, and maybe not so far in the back-- but it was never the main thing-- that my blog was going to get attention from someone who would want to publish my writing in some more permanent form. But the doing the blog is itself the act of publishing it in a pretty permanent form. It could be that only seven people have read it—other than myself—but the impetus for writing it is the act of testifying to what it means to be human in the world-- one person’s experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. To say, I was here, I lived, and I experienced these things. If anyone at all reads them and is moved to laugh or cry (a lot more crying, I am guessing and have been told, than laughing—at this point, anyway), then it has been worth doing and I can die knowing I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. The sense of satisfaction I get when I feel I’ve expressed myself well is real and profound.

But it would be nice to get some sort of offer from the larger world, wouldn’t it? On days when work is particularly hairy and unpleasant, like the past couple of days (not coincidentally, right after getting the literary magazine idea), I walk around the office thinking how great it would be for all the people on my floor, including all those who are in the wordsmithing and publishing business to hear, oh, did you know that Cher Stepanek, who works over there in that department, has a book coming out? Wow, she writes? Why, The Big Boss asks, isn’t she working for me in some literary capacity? Why have we not recognized her talents; why have we been letting her languish in Department X?

It’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? We are all walking around knowing deep in our bones we’re special, we have something wonderful about ourselves that none of the people we see and interact with every day knows about. Wouldn’t it be great, we think, if one day they realized who we really are? Wouldn’t it be great if they found out, too, that we have this secret life in which our talents are well developed, well realized, and recognized by this whole huge group of others, yet somehow they, the people we see and interact with every day, have missed it? To be recognized as special: it’s what we all want, and I want it too. That is aside from the impulse, and I want to call it a purer impulse, to say what I want and need to say, to put it out there for (theoretically) all the world to see on the internet, and then go about my life not really tracking who is actually seeing it. I'm thinking that maybe it’s kind of an adolescent wish, that need to be recognized as special. It’s the wish of someone who has not yet learned or realized their own best way of making their mark in the world. Or maybe it's one of the stigmata borne by children of divorced parents. Or maybe it’s universal, but people just stop admitting it, or get too beaten down to remember they felt it.

I have set my self this evening the task of writing for fifteen minutes nonstop, and am almost finished. There, it’s done.