Things You Find in Your House While Cleaning–Part II
So I found this old notebook that I used from around my junior year of high school through first year of college. It’s full of crappy poetry and drafts of things never completed, along with fragments of early published stories like “Mahout” (Asimov’s) and “So The Dead Walk Slowly” (Fear Magazine).
But if I’d lost it and someone had found it, they’d have found little evidence this person was ever gonna publish a book or two…
Like, a poem entitled “Pity Me Monster Math Unkind,” modeled after cummings. Or “A Flash of Blue,” a retelling of the wooden boy story that starts off “The sea was his womb and his creator a pair of wrinkled hands that lifted him, senseless, from the churning surf.”
A discarded beginning from a tale meant for The Book of Frog: “When there were no kings and the moors were silent with the sound of their own silent breathing, there was only toad. Toad, sitting high upon a half-submerged hillock, surveying his broken kingdom.”
Something about a storm, no idea what it was from: “The rain came twisting and pelting down harder and harder, blasting in from the sea, the sound accelerating, moving into higher and higher gear.”
The thing is, I was writing this stuff at the same time as the story that got into Asimov’s. You hit on something that works, that has structural integrity, but you don’t know how you did it. So even after you get published in places you consider an indication that you might have what it takes to make it, you spend a lot of years figuring out how to consciously replicate the things you did without thinking, so you can do them consistently.
January 5, 2009 at 5:27 pm
I can actually read that handwriting. It must be a forgery!
January 5, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Tess, I was thinking the same thing! That and how rare it is to see anyone write in cursive anymore.
January 5, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Larry: well, the notebook does date itself as 1986 so…
January 5, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I still write in cursive. Writing in block letters sucks…and looks creeeepy.
January 5, 2009 at 8:59 pm
You write in cursive? How odd.
I curse in writive.
January 6, 2009 at 1:46 am
I prefer a mixture of both when I write. What’s strange is seeing how in less than 20 years, virtually none of my students write in full cursive. The majority don’t write anything but in block/print. Strange, huh?
January 7, 2009 at 2:04 am
I don’t know what things were like back in the day, but I had only a few months in 3rd grade dedicated to learning cursive during school. Until the end of elementary my classmates and I were encouraged to write essays in cursive, and graded down for its lack. In middle-school none of the teachers cared any longer, and by high-school there was ‘CAN’T READ THIS’ in large red print.
It’s sad, really. I think it’s beautiful, but I can’t for the life of me write in it anymore. Even my block writing sucks, and I’m an artist. I was born in 1985, by the way, to give this a timeline.
A really awesome project for anyone who’s teaching would be to try and put aside some fragment of time to help coach students on their handwriting skills…
January 7, 2009 at 11:38 am
You know, I just assumed everyone still knew how to write in cursive. That’s kind of scary.
January 7, 2009 at 7:49 pm
“Penmanship is dying…”
January 7, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Jeff, if you were to see some of the other things that I’ve detected in student writings, their lack of cursive writing would be among the least scary things, unfortunately. Sad how few know how to identify a topic sentence in a paragraph these days…