I am dismantling notebooks. And it feels so good. Throwing away old lists. Forgotten sentences. Half-finished writing projects and plans for writing projects. I am streamlining the places where I record my own creativity. Trying to spill out in only a few notebooks this fall, a season of changes, both atmospheric and academic. I’ve de-spiraled two notebooks already, salvaging only the pages that still interest me, pulling the long silver coils from cardboard bindings. As I sit on a bench outside the ballet studio (because don’t the biggest moments of writing progress always happen during times of forced waiting, when there is simply nothing more to do but check Twitter one more time or face the writing demons) I hold on my lap an emaciated composition notebook, its guts in a pile on the bench beside me. Now the blank pages fill up behind the organized lists of various projects in progress–or not–and I feel ready. Ready to stop procrastinating. Ready to stop making excuses. Ready to write–both for here and not, keeping my eyes set on bigger goals. And as I sit here I read this quote again, the third time since discovering it in the small, orange notebook that now is in pieces in the bottom of my bag and will be safely discarded when I get home.
“When you have a flash of understanding on one topic, you can write an essay. Write an essay and you tackle a scene. Master the scene and you can write 75 of them and have a book.”—Marion Roach Smith, “The Memoir Project."
Sounds possible, doesn’t it?
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Originally published in September 2012