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Getting Started (3 of 5): Experimental Writer
When a reader makes her way through a book, she likes for page 56 to relate in some semi-predictable way to page 55. It’s not a lot to ask, but it took me a long time to figure that out. See, I think of my high school years as my “experimental writer” phase. It was experimental because I wrote down pretty much everything that crossed my mind, whether it was two sentences long or 15 pages, whatever weird ass form it might take. I thought everything I wrote belonged in a book, too.
I wanted to call that book Musings. It would be a chronological record of, well, whatever-I’d-written up to the point that someone decided to publish it. When I looked into it, publishers all listed themselves as seeking books in particular categories: historical fiction, how-to, poetry, political history. Where was the market for books of authors rambling on about whatever? Remember, this was all well before the Internet - no blogging yet!
At times, I’ve bemoaned the fact that my writing doesn’t feel as “free” as it did then. I couldn’t write the crazy things I wrote in my “Musings” era now if I felt desperate too. My brain would just never permit my pages so little structure, but I try to keep in mind that if Musings had ever seen print, it would have contained everything from pretentious stories without recourse to a beginning, middle or end to prose poetry that didn’t make any sense.
Musings became a volume about volume. I used to calculate whether or not I had enough matter to justify surrounding it with cloth binding. I hoped to get the collection into print and then I had a whole string of titles to contain the next several entries in my Literary Brainstormer’s Omnibus. The first order of business, though, had to be generating sufficient content, because nothing could be better in my young mind than publishing a book.
Musings’s only unifying theme was me, but that doesn’t tell you much because I didn’t know who I was. Re-writing is the writer’s introspection, and I wasn’t doing much introspection. The unreflected life may or may not be worth living, but it definitely is not worth reading.