My first attempt at writing was during my junior year. I borrowed an old-fashioned mechanical typewriter from my middle school computer teacher as sort of a novelty. I cleaned all the dust our of the lever arms and oiled it up so that it was running smooth. I even got a new ink ribbon for it so that everything was back in working order. Then I decided it would be funny to take it to school and take notes with it. My teachers didn't really appreciate the horrendous racket it produced and asked me to stop or get out within the first 3 minutes of class.
 |
| Mine looked something like this...but dustier. |
After a day of carrying the 30 pound metal typewriter around school, I decided I'd had my fun so now I should actually do something productive with it. I had played with the idea of starting a memoir before but had never really worked up the motivation to get some words down. I thought using the typewriter was fun so maybe I would enjoy typing up a memoir! I like the idea of chronicling my life so that I can look back when I'm 70 and say "holy crap I can't believe I did that" or "wow I was really stupid back then". I don't want to forget any of the cool stuff I did so a memoir seemed fitting.
Writing a book is a lot of work. I guess I didn't really appreciate that going into it. People spend years writing books but I thought I could bust out a working draft within a couple of weeks. Pretty much what happened is I sat down in front of the typewriter, got my paper ready and made sure the ink was working. Then stared at the page for 15 minutes. I decided to start with why I was writing the memoir and typed up some junk. I went back and read and realized how repetitive I sounded so I took it out, crumpled it up and threw it away. I'm not sure if I'm not really a good writer or if I'm just to critical of my own work but it took me all afternoon to get a measly two or three pages of content that I was satisfied with.
Once the novelty of the typewriter wore off and I was focusing more on content, I started loosing interest in the project. Sitting down and trying to write a chapter of material that was worth reading just seemed like to much work and more than I was willing to do. Typewriters are fun, trying to write a whole book in a few weeks was not. So I gave up and decided to revisit the project another time.
That's pretty much what this blog is I guess. I want to make note of the things I've done so far before I forget about them so that, at some point, I can look back and remember all of my experiences. Blogging is just a less formal way of doing it. In a book, I feel like I have to make the language formal and use ornate phrasing and write long chapters on every experience and get the grammar just right and use engaging literary devices and remember what my English teachers taught me about writing and avoid run-on sentences and avoid using words like junk and stuff and stuff like that. But that's hard.
So far my revisit to writing a memoir (blog version) seems to be going well. It's a lot easier to just write the way I would talk. I can make entries as long or short as I want depending on what the story I'm telling calls for. It's nice. I just hope this doesn't turn into a failed project too.
-Me, the Wannabe Author
No comments:
Post a Comment