What I'm actually going to turn in for Creative Writing

Writing Pains
Emily Dabczynski

I have this thing where I feel like I can’t write very well. I’m not dreadfully confident about what I can do. I have an overwhelming love-hate relationship with words that has been known to drive me close to tears. Occasionally I become so involved in a paper that it’s the only thing I can think about. The topic and my vision for what is sure to be a masterpiece pounds relentlessly at my conscious until I set all else aside, pounding my creativity into a literary pulp.

But who likes pulp? The orange juice with pulp is always in stock at the grocery store. Why buy juice with pulp if you can buy juice without pulp?

Pulp.

Pulp.

It stops sounding like a word when you repeat it enough times.

I don’t feel like I can write well without someone giving me a topic. Like Saturday Night Live’s Linda Richman—“Chickpea. Neither a chick, nor a pea. Discuss.” How would you like to have that for a prompt? None of this introspective, uncomfortable stuff. Just write about the key ingredient in hummus and Burmese tofu. Now there's a. Oh, didn’t you know chickpeas were used in Burmese tofu? Neither did I, until I checked Wikipedia.

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I’ve always been influenced by authors I’m reading. Imitation is supposedly the sincerest form of flattery, but in my case, I occasionally have wondered if it’s flat-out, unintentional plagiarism. Well of course it’s not actual plagiarism, but give a week for the immediate admiration to wear off and I might return to a piece thinking, Who in the world wrote this? Why is my name at the top of this page? This isn’t me.

It’s some kind of an idealized me, I think. It goes back to those insecurities about not being able to write. I’ve always been able to imitate fairly well. I give a great deal of credit to observation and imitation when it comes to any success I’ve had studying dance and acting. Plato hated theatre because he felt people should study real life instead of wasting time watching others portray real life. What does it say about me that I acquire performance skills by watching others in their portrayals of characters? To me, that somehow puts a whole new meaning on the Six Degrees of Separation.

It’s not surprising that I did relatively well on an assignment last year in which our class had to write a poetry in the styles of the time periods we were studying. We had to put ourselves in the Romantic Period, for instance, and create a piece in such a way that we might trick others into believing it was written by an obscure author during that time. I worked really hard on that piece. I got an A. I have a nagging feeling everyone in the class got full credit for effort, even if they sucked.

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One of the main problems with my lack of confidence when it comes to writing is the irresistible attraction I have toward Hollywood. If I can’t be on the screen, I’d love to be on the writing staff of a wildly successful television series. Television might be my calling—you never know. The idea of writing years’ worth of material for an Emmy winning ensemble is so vastly more appealing than writing one lousy blockbuster. How many film series have actually been successful? The Land Before Time, while sweetened by years, and years, and years of nostalgia, doesn’t quite stack up to Star Wars.

Well, it might stack up to Attack of the Clones.

And I hardly need to mention Bridget Jones and her buddies who run that Daddy Daycare.

But think of all the brilliant television series’ that only gain popularity with each passing season. Heroes is currently the highest rated series of all time. The Simpsons has only bettered with age. Seinfeld-isms have made it into mainstream slang, used even by people who don’t know the origin of “man hands,” for example. I’m stunned that the creators and writers of Law & Order can keep the series running for 17 years, continue to develop new and interesting plots, and support a number of subsequent spin-off shows.

Then there are those writers who do it all, like the cast of The Office. The staff collaborates on every minute detail of every single episode, and at the end of the day, half of them get to appear as members of the cast to boot.

Sign me up for that gig. If I can latch onto any confidence, anyway.

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I tried to be a spy once when I was ten years old. On the first page of a fresh new journal I vowed to write down everything I saw, just the way I saw it. I think my vow was the opening lines to Harriet the Spy, verbatim.

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My biggest frustration is when I want so desperately for an idea to gel together. I had a paper all mapped out, fully researched, and I was so excited for it to come together as only my wildest dreams could produce. Evidently, truly it could only be produced in my wildest dreams.

It was going to be about the 1919 Boston Molasses Flood in which a tank of molasses on the North End exploded, sending 2.3 million gallons of hot, sticky molasses careening down the street at a whopping 35 miles-per-hour. The wave was at least 15 feet high. It sounds ridiculous and unfathomable, which is why so many think their leg is being pulled when they first hear about it. Giggles are stifled, though, when they go on to learn that 21 people died, including a 9-year old boy whose body was found four days later and was so unrecognizable that his own father was forced to identify him by his red sweater. Jaws drop when they hear of the minimum of 150 more that were injured. One man, pinned beneath a pool table in a collapsed building, was transformed from a healthy, middle-aged father to a crippled old man in a single afternoon. His dark brown hair bleached white in the few hours he was trapped, and his broken back would never heal so that he could stand upright ever again. Dozens of horses would be so enmeshed in the congealing liquid that rescue workers simply shot them to put them out of their misery. $1 million worth of damage--$100 million, by today’s standards—was reeked on the area, and vestiges of molasses were found throughout the entire city for years to come.

It’s kind of the perfect shocking event to base a paper on. The story is highly intriguing, one of those footnotes in history you read about and wonder how you never heard of it before. I had it perfectly planned out write—mosaic structure, with a combination of narrative, quotes from the thousands of pages of court testimony, and even a recipe for these molasses spice cookies my grandma used to make. The juxtaposition of a horrifying tragedy and a sweet cookie recipe was going to be fantastically effective.

The act of reaching creative perfection was a whole separate story altogether, however. There wasn’t much research to labor over, considering only one good book has been written about the flood. The difficulty was fitting all the pieces together the way I envisioned. So much information in only 8 pages!

Hours and hours later, I was positively, maddeningly stumped, but I was so excited about the possibilities that could come from this topic that I was unwilling to even consider another—another angle, another subject. Sure, professional writers regularly take years to finish what they begin, but an 8-page unit final was surely not worth the amount of self-loathing that was weighing on me, physical and oppressive in my chest.

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“Late at night, my mind would come alive with voices and stories and friends as dear to me as any in the real world. I gave myself up to it, longing for transformation.” So says Josephine March, my self-proclaimed fictional alter-ego. I long for it too. How I do.

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It’s strange how people can take for granted the natural talents they have. My sister is of those people who are just good at everything she tries, so when she works, even just a little bit, she’s extra-good at it. She’ll probably be an Grammy-winning jazz trombone player and singer, a successful business owner, a sports therapist, a bestselling novelist, and the star of a Broadway musical, all before she turns 30. I’ve got talents of my own, to be sure, but not the way my proverbial green-eyes would prefer.

And we’re prone to wanting what we don’t have. There would be no need to want a thing if it was already ours. That’s where the pain creeps in—the pure, unadulterated aching for perfection in whatever we chase after. I yearn for a true love affair with words. I crave the ability to mold and shape sentences in such a way that I might express the inexpressible. I covet masterful authority of the English language, and envy those who have the incomparable capacity to whip and beat an idea into linguistic submission. I don’t want to face frustration and disappointment in doing a thing I so desperately want to love.

George Bernard Shaw said, “Words are only postage stamps delivering the object you wish to unwrap.” I think he means to be positive, maybe even encouraging.

Funny. I’m not encouraged.