I had a creative writing professor last year who told me the way to be a writer is to notice. She always said, “Bad writers plagiarize, good writers steal.” Everything around you can become a story if you want it to, you just have to remember to write it down. In my desperation to become a writer in any way, this is the advice I have held in my hands.
âA story about someone who plays Tetris to avoid thinking about trauma.âÂ
âJeffrey Dahmer was baptized the same day John Wayne Gacy was executed. (use?)â
âA napkin that just says âAliens exist.ââ
âTeacher with two different shoes on.â
âThe moon is like a banana.â
âBoy who cracks his knuckles in the same way every time.â
âCoworker who walks down the street on his break to buy me a slushie. He wonât let me pay him back. Itâs the hottest day of the summer. It melts before he gets back. I drink all of it anyway.â
I keep journals full of these things. Facts I learn in documentaries, things about the person next to me on the bus. Things my mother says to me when I havenât slept all night. It is difficult for me to accept that it is possible to be a writer and also possible to not be obsessed with oneself. Art as a form of expression is, after all, inherently indulging in self-interest. The practice of making it about others is sometimes all I can bear to do to keep me from going insane.Â
I began writing as a way to understand myself, as all twelve-year-old girls at one point are begging themselves to do. All I could do was write about myself. The insistance of the frizz in my hair, the way my left eye is smaller when I smile, and why is it like that? Why do adults laugh at me but kids my age think Iâm weird? What is the point of life and why did I have that dream last night?
Turn it inside out, take in everything you can, and write it down. My grandfather that I havenât seen since I was four, died last year. When we went through his stuff, we got to see what he looked like as a teenager. The look in his eyes thatâs in every portrait of someone pre-2010. Looking at something you just canât quite see, a smile on his lips, his left eye squinted. This goes in my notebooks too. I show it to my mother and she smiles, her left eye squinting. I scrawl something along the lines of
âDonât make about me. We are mirrors of each other folding in and out and that is the part that matters.â
I donât use this for a story. This one I keep in my notebook underneath my bed that gathers dust until something important happens.Â
The rest of the page saysÂ
âFACT: Everyone at Woodstock was almost electrocuted. Fried hippies?â
âNames of my great grandmothers: Ida, Ruby, Dorothy, Alice. Good character names.â
âThe love between you and the drunk girl who falls into you at a party and apologizes with glee, the joy in it. There is nothing like this connection.â
This is all on the same page. None of it means anything, but as Joan Didion says on keeping a notebook, âI remember being there.â
Even if you aren’t a writer, write down the things that make you feel this way. Even the things that don’t. In the least dramatic way I can say that the point of life is to notice, the point of life is to notice. The connections we make are what make us. The ducks I saw in the pond that was created under the bench outside my class on space travel this morning. The men older than my dad on my soccer team who give me their old cleats so I don’t have to buy new ones. The dips in the marble steps in Suzallo that are worn down from the years and years of people walking up there to learn and walking down to go learn more. Sometimes I walk through there just to look at the dips in the steps and try to make them a little deeper. And then, when I reach the top, I write about doing so.