Tuesday, April 05, 2005

(Wanna-be-)Writer’s Block
It’s time to start on my second short story of the semester for this writing class I’m taking, and after a couple hours of sitting in front of my computer typing kee-rap yesterday, it occurs to me that everything I think to write about this early in my renewed Attempt at Writing stage in life, will necessarily be a cliché.

I don’t really have an interesting childhood to go back and dig around in. Flannery O’Conner said something like "If you survived childhood, you have at least 5 novels in you." I cannot fathom five novels about growing up middle class and white and average in suburban Pittsburgh, though; at least, not right now, as I stare down the ceaseless blinking of the cursor.

In college, I had a roommate who was from the rural swamps of North Carolina. She had a whole passel of relatives and ancestors who set one another on fire and hanged themselves and escaped floods -- and she was a damn fine writer, besides.

Back in grade school, I would write about girls who flew to new planets in cardboard rocket-ships powered by grape juice. I had a whole literary series about the zany adventures of a cat named Frisky. I was also a better liar back then. I could lie with a straight face. I could fool anyone. Of course, maybe I just believed this to be the case. I was, after all, eight years old.

For some reason, by college, I had stopped writing. I took a gander at my new Swamp-Genius writer-friend, considered my own bland background, and said, "Okay, so she writes. What will be my thing?" And I made my thing activism and anthropology and philosophy and women’s studies and insert-Alice’s-major-of-the-month here. I lived as if I was the original and only earnest shaggeddy armpit-haired/fist-in-the-air’ed university student.
And I had a great time, but the funny thing is that while I was all this countercultural blah-de-blah, I still was so afraid of conflict that I stopped doing
one thing I loved to do, just because I didn’t want to compete with my friend. Identity is a strange thing. It’s malleable. And often by forces you’d
least expect. Usually inside your own damn self, right?

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