They Say, I Say

This is one of my favorite introductory composition textbooks because it helps students situate their own writing within the context of a larger conversation. And this is how I try to construct my own writing—“They (archaeologists) say that funerary traditions are part of how a community constructs itself through the preservation of social memory, and I say that not only is this true of material objects, but textual constructions from within that community as well.” Except this conversation that I’m situating myself within is actually a metaconversation over in the corner about the bigger, louder conversation that everyone else is having while they bury their dead and write through their own experiences about mourning, memory, and community.

There’s a place for those conversations in the corner, and I don't intend to swear them off forever (I'm still participating in them, in fact, though to a lesser degree) but it’s all I’ve been doing.

For years, I’ve been studying the creations of other people while suppressing my own desire to create simply because there was not enough time to do both. Sitting down to sketch or to draft a poem or essay in my own voice seemed like a waste of valuable time when I could be writing the “important” things I felt I had to write. Well, now I no longer have to write anything at all. With all my newfound freedom, if I were to take my own creativity half as seriously as I have taken the creativity of the author of Njáls Saga, I would have more than enough time to write, or paint, or practice piano (after we get a piano, anyway), or whatever my little artsy heart desires. But I find myself feeling anxious at the thought of sitting down to write, not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I have so much to say and I’m afraid of letting seven years of pent-up thinking spill out onto a page because it will be such a mess and not at all as carefully constructed as I would like it to be, like all the other writing that I’ve done.* Or like all the other writing that I’ve been studying. It’s intimidating to go from immersing myself in the greatest written works to have survived the past thousand years or so to trying to make my own!

I have to develop a new discipline of writing. Instead of forcing myself to sit down for such-and-such amount of time every day to fill out secondary source material or to fine-tune my introductory paragraphs, I need to train myself to bring out my own words, sort through them to find the right ones, and then take a little time to edit them. Because my own words about my own experience deserve at least as much care as my words about other peoples’ experiences. I’ve been trapped in a world of “They say,” and I’d like to have my own say as well. Hopefully there will be a post here every week. I'm not going to try to say it has to be every Wednesday, or whatever, but if it's Saturday and there hasn't been anything that week, you have permission to pester me ;-)

Question for all you creative types—how do you prioritize making your own stuff (for lack of a better word) when everything seems so much more significant? Like, I'm writing this right now when I should probably be picking up the piles of books (mine and the kids') that are covering the living room floor. And there are boxes of even more books in the corner that I still haven't unpacked. The downstairs is the same, except with laundry on the floor instead of books. And let's not talk about the kitchen or the impassable entryway. Sitting down to write this feels incredibly self-indulgent and, dare I say, lazy? Writing this much in a day when it's about to be sent to my dissertation committee feels productive—writing this much just because I want to feels like slacking off.

*I’m not knocking careful construction—it’s definitely something I aspire to. But I have to remind myself that this is a new (to me) and completely different genre of writing—to be honest I don’t even know what careful construction looks like in this context! It’s something that is likely to be highly idiosyncratic and that I’ll just need to figure out as I go.