September the First

This was supposed to be posted on September 1^st to kick off my renewed commitment to writing…which went something like “Sure, I slacked off this summer, but starting September 1^st, I’m going to write every day, no matter what.” Famous last words. “No matter what” was a slight exaggeration. Life happens. Family comes in town from India. Other family members have housewarming parties in New Jersey that you need to attend. Road trips ensue. Crazy masses of relatives descend upon you and fail recognize you might need a moment’s peace. Then, as the day comes to a close and you find a place of more or less stillness, the Wi-Fi you had been relying on to actually work, fails to do so from the corner of the basement you’ve eked out for yourself. You want to jump up and down. You want to pull your hair out. Your mind ignores the fact that this is truly a First World problem. Its anal, obsessive, perfectionist mode has been switched on and it rams itself against your skull, demanding an answer. Luckily, your heart’s in the right place. And though your head would argue, your heart knows that pestering your aunt -- who has been up to her neck in a sea of berserk extended family, of which you are one -- to reset the router when she has to get up in five hours to prepare the house for another onslaught would be a little…unkind. This is my lesson on this first(ish) day of the month. So I will rest, reassuring my mind that even as I save this (offline) at 12:30am on September 2, it is still September 1^st in much of this vast nation of ours.                                         

A Tale to Tell

When I was a kid, I used to tell stories. My parents have audio tapes of me making up stories about a crow, never pausing before the words came tumbling out of me. I would create tales to keep father from getting bored when he was working about the house (poor dad). I wrote stories about lands I had never visited and using words I didn’t know how to spell. When I reached my teens, my brother used to tease me that all my stories involved someone dying. This was not so. Killing people was so uncouth. My fiction was simply dark and tragic. Just like I was convinced my life was.

This all stopped midway through high school. I went through a pretty serious depression and didn’t see the point in writing stories. I had piles of unfinished stories that went nowhere. I wasn’t interested in publishing them, so why bother creating more? My depression eased with time, but I had become serious about what I engaged in. It had to have a purpose if I was to devote time to it. It had to be for school or for work or to achieve some end game. If it didn’t have a useful goal, then it was too frivolous. After all, why waste energy on something that wouldn’t improve my life in some visible way? Why create just for myself?

This mindset lasted throughout my twenties. Slowly, slowly, I started seeing the value of doing things just because. Even so, it was hard to allow myself to have mindless fun. I had to judge it or try to fit it into some overarching plan. “I need to get in the habit of journaling. This will help me fix myself.”, “If I write for the joy of it, it will release my creativity which I can then harness and write something truly of value.” I couldn’t fool myself into it. In fact,it was only fairly recently that I found a tactic that worked for me. I wrote to make a practice of writing. Forming a good habit was reason enough and it stuck. But I still had a hard time justifying fiction.

Until two weeks ago. It started with a primal desire to read a novel. Not listen to an unabridged audiobook while I was also engaged in another activity, but to read a book I could touch, smell and turn the pages of. It had been awhile for me and it felt so good to be in an author’s grasp.

I don’t know what turned this enjoyment of reading into a need to create a story of my own, but I welcomed it. I started coming up with ideas. Unlike in the past, I didn’t get discouraged or bored in my thinking. And unlike in the past, I wrote them down and started thinking about how to flesh them out. Since then, my mind has been abuzz creating a story. What characters, what plot, what world. My story muscles are admittedly quite flabby. But, I’m working on firming them up. I have to say that this effort feels so good. Like I’m returning home. Or to my childhood. That’s reason enough for me.