You know when you get all contemplative? I do that, too.
I go to college, and my college...the Creative Writing Department brings in all sorts of people. Famous people, people you might never have heard of but are published writers...and they come to talk, and they share their experiences with a room of college students who, most of the time, don't have the bravery or the curiosity to raise their hands and ask questions at the end.
I half wonder if I should be reading more. I feel very ignorant of great writers who aren't ground into our heads in high school. Haven't you noticed that? Schools teach the words of dead people, words that were meant for the populace of their time. In 200 years, perhaps they'll still be read (I mean, some things are timeless and part of the canon of the world), but what else will be present? Will the work of my peers stand the test of time? Will mine? Will, someday, a young Creative Writing major hear my name in a lecture and wonder, "What was so great about this chick that her stuff's still read today?" Will people cherish the words I have left behind?
I want them to. So badly, that's what I want - to be remembered as someone who made a contribution to literature with her work...someone who doesn't bore her readers when they get my stuff pushed onto them in class. Someone who can be influenced and can influence others...
I read a lot of fanfiction in the Hetalia community, and I find amazing writers - fabulous writers - that would be robbing the world of something wonderful if they did not go on and publish original work. I think there's really one writer in my major that I actually respect, and that's because he's damn good at what he does. I feel inadequate, but I want that kind of immortality, and to get it, I need more skill. I want that skill, perhaps, even more than I want to be remembered, and as I write, I wonder how many other kids in my major want that, too. I've been thinking about it a lot, lately, how badly I want to reach that point, and I feel it in my bones, that ache. It's a beautiful feeling, to want something that you believe that, somehow, you can achieve with your own hands given time and patience and practice.
But in this era, in my present situation, I'm not sure how much time I have before I won't be able to exert the patience and practice. Those I have in endless supply for this, but time is the only fleeting commodity. I could go to work after college to pay my now growing loan debt, and I could work so hard and so long that I can never write. I could end up married, and slowly have the role of wife and, I'm sure, mother, absorb what little else I have. Or, Heaven forbid, I could die young, and my journals and loose papers could scatter to the wind and never be read by anyone.
It's okay, though. I feel like I'm finally taking the steps I need to take to get to that far-off point that I know is far-off, but I hope is less far-off than I think. Slow, inching baby steps, but yes, I feel myself growing as a writer, learning and accepting facts that I refused to hear before.
Something that's frustrated me so much is my inability to really know what's going on in another person's head. I guess it's hard for anyone to accept that others feel and think, just as I do. I mean, I know it, but it's something you wonder in the corner of your mind...how are they the way they are? You can't even figure that out if you went into your head; seriously, I still wonder why I act the way I act sometimes. So, in line with this, I wonder just how much are the other writers around me learning? Are they awakening to new thoughts and possibilities, as I feel I am starting to do? The way they act, and what I hear and have explained to me by others, makes me almost doubt that they are. But perhaps I don't give them enough credit. They've made it this far without changing their minds, right?
..Haaah! I just went all introspective on you, didn't I? Ahn...I do feel better about getting all that out, though.