Spain in 10 Days

I leave for Spain in ten days. Instead of running around like a chicken with my head cut off gathering all the things I may or may not need, and instead of attempting to teach myself Spanish, I picked up my notebook and started writing again. I started a story when I was a senior in high school, and I have been working at it on and off for two years. Two years with the same ideal of working on this special project has begun to wear on me. To remedy the situation, I took my notebook out and wrote for the entire hour-and-a-half plane ride home for Winter Break. An hour and a half isn’t much, but that amount of time can serve as a wonderful catalyst. When I arrived at home, I spent at least one day of break typing up what I had written, and then I went beyond what I had written, making stuff up without letting it flow out of my brain, through my hand, and into the ink. I was producing sentences and pages which seemed to make sense, and I added a good ten pages over break without help from my manuscript. Overall I added about eighteen pages, the equivalent of another third of the manuscript, which is more than I had done for many months. As Winter Break progressed and the holidays ensued, my project slowly fell off the edge of my to-do list. Then I got my wisdom teeth out and didn’t feel like doing anything whatsoever for a week.

All too soon, it was time to go back to college, and the semester started off at breakneck speed. Halfway through the semester, my computer crashed. Despite a techie friend’s attempt and a recovery professional’s assessment, recovering the data from the old computer’s hard drive would cost a pretty penny. The price climbed too quickly for my tastes just as my disappointment spiraled downward. Needless to say, I did not take the loss of my hard drive well; it had three years’ worth of photographs, music, and Word documents. Luckily, though, I had sent an e-mail of my typescript to my brother, so I was able to recover almost everything of that story – I’ll call it the N document. However, I did not recover the parts that I had put in spontaneously without writing them in my notebook first. For two months, even the prospect of writing was depressing. Now with unstructured time yet a lot of things to do in that time, I turn back to this creative writing project.

Triskele

At the beginning of the process of recapturing what I had written, I was not too thrilled. Trying to write what I had lost was like trying to make my baby teeth grow in again: painful, impossible, felt wholly unnecessary. I took out my R.S.V.P. Fine point pen and my Moleskine with the triskele sticker on it and began to write. (Actually, I pulled up the distribution of all the last names from a genealogical survey performed some time ago. At the point of the story I’m working on, there is an influx of characters, and I needed a gallery of ready-made character names from which to draw. They’re not terribly important in the story, and I enjoy making up names like Cylus Killary, Teigen Sivret Dunseith, and Mintaly Ehle. With an arsenal of names, I started writing, and the writing was good.) Instead of thinking that I have to rewrite and recapture perfectly what I had written, I decided to move forward knowing that I had already written it once, and now was an opportunity to remember and expand upon what I wrote the first time, making it better and better. I felt myself to be a creative, generative force, and rewriting has only unlocked that realization.

Rewriting in my notebook the ten pages I lost has been good for me, food and fodder for my imagination. If only I had thought that a few hours ago; my potential, my imaginative creation of the world felt like it had left me, and I probably treated my brother and his problems with indelicacy. A few hours ago, my outlook seemed pretty grim; now it is a bit more rose-colored. And I’m still ignoring the fact that I don’t know how to speak Spanish.

On an unrelated note, I saw one of my old French teachers today. Speaking French is like swimming in a kiddie pool; trying to learn Spanish is like a piece of (spoony) driftwood trying to swim against a riptide.

Rice Spoon

Other credits: "The Long Leg," Edward Hopper