Narratizing
Elenya, Pearl, and Peachy have all given me thoughts about writing to write about. I’ll pick one at random and go with that.
Peachy says that she wrote her autobiography when she was about twelve. Knowing Peachy, that would be an interesting read whether she spent her childhood wrangling crocodiles or was a quiet child just sharing the contents of her mind. (Her incredible aptitude for filking, for example-wheels turning round and round!)
There’s always that bug to get it out there, tell your story, and so on. I think that even before paper (but after rock and scissors), there’s an urge to narratize. My earliest memories are of walking around thinking of myself as the character in some sort of narrative:
"As she walked up the sidewalk she felt glad that school was over for the day. None of her friends were there to walk home with her, so she was all alone as she turned onto Fourteenth Street. As she climbed the seven concrete steps to her house, the fourth one with the big crack down the middle with weeds growing in it, she wished it was Thursday night when her family all sat on the living room sofa, ate TV dinners on TV trays, and watched Leave it to Beaver. But it wasn’t Thursday, it was Tuesday, so she ought to practice violin. Her lesson was not until Monday, though, so she really didn’t need to hurry. But then she felt anxious because if she put practice off one day she would go on putting it off until Sunday, which meant she would not have a good violin lesson."
(There you have a slice of life in 1950's America. Television had been introduced as an upscale form of entertainment, TV dinners and TV trays were brand new how-did-anybody-ever-think-this-up things, and Leave it to Beaver had not yet been replaced by Huckleberry Hound in the Thursday line-up. My family was at first devastated by the change, but soon were great fans of Huckleberry Hound and spin-off characters Yogi Bear and Boo-boo. Every baby-boomer who had a younger sibling, a brother in particular, called that sib Boo-boo and does to this day.)
Yikes. Flashback. Well, anyway, the point here is not the seeming picture of bourgeois bliss (which it most definitely was not-trust me, I was there), but that all those memories come down to me as narratives.
Does everybody do this when they’re little, or only incipient writers? The top of my head came off one day when I was a bit older and my dad-who grew up to be a writer and many other things-mentioned that he had done the same thing as a boy:
"He did not want to go to sleep. He wanted sit up in bed reading Tahara, Boy Mystic of India."
Future writers? Or, on the other hand, future drama queens? (In both our cases, yes.) A bit of both, maybe. I read somewhere-don’t recall where-that people make art the way an oyster makes a pearl. From the inner detritus it tries to make something better.