Them Blurry Notes

They distracted me multiple times - the underlines, the arrows, the stars, the ticks, the blurry notes - but not to the point where I couldn’t follow the text, but definitely to the point where I felt as though they themselves were text in their own rights. I was hearing two separate voices. And while one was telling me all that she thought she knew about shitty first drafts, the other was telling me what ideas were less shittier than others and demanded close attention. I have always wanted to do that to other people - leaving breadcrumbs and myself behind.

Like how I took Biology back in high school and I took notes in the ginormous book and underlined and wrote questions to the side. Yes all these did help came the time I needed to regurgitate and hurl everything back up on paper. But there was always this sense of self-indulgence in the back of my mind about passing along to the next guy in line my keen and astute observations and my genuine inquisitiveness of the pen-pushers and the worlds they flesh out. Form of narcissism?

More like insecurity. But then again they can be one and the same. Both pull the strings and leave the unfortunate shouting in the dark and demanding notice. Not really a space to meander on that here. But you get the idea.

I have never sold that Biology textbook back, though. I don’t know what happened to it and where I left it. So that was as wild as my fantasy got.

But I do wonder, though, if this sense of insecurity the same kind that cripples inventiveness and  “suspends animation”, to phrase the author. Perfectionism to her is a result of writing too little because of whatever that makes a person shy away from tearing open the unconscious. So she  encourages unabashed, straight up full-blown ranting (then funneling, of course), like it’s a treatment to the condition of the uninitiated. Ok. Sure. Maybe they’re one and the same, minus the part where mine focuses on shoving my unconscious in someone’s face. Cognito ergo sum.

But here’s what I don’t get. What good does it do if you don’t show people your shitty first drafts? Lamott says, “all I had to do was to write a really shitty first draft, of say, the opening paragraph. And no one was going to see it.” Heck, that’s the devil and the deep blue sea right there. And the thing is, they’re not equally problematic. By not showing people shitty first drafts, we create this barrier between us and the aspired, telling them we’re God materials and untouchable. Vonnegut, Tim O’ Brien, J K Rowling, whoever. We’ve heard and seen them talk about themselves struggling creatively. But their creative battles relay like mountain sermons down through whatever secondary or tertiary clean-shaved narrative funnels we get our stories from, ultimately raising the stakes even higher for the untrained. I want to see them bare. Imperfect. Unrefined. I want to see Harry Potter before he was Harry Potter. I want to see Felix Hoenikker before he was Felix Hoenikker. I want to see Tim the narrator before he was Tim the narrator. And I want to see “Shitty First Drafts” before it was “Shitty First Drafts”.

Instead I’m online and trying to meet the deadline for this blog post. No drafts. Just naked and unafraid.

Sometimes I feel like we the pupils are ten times the writers than the masters. Form of narcissism?

More like insecurity.