Things I Have Learned

I don't think we'd identify as a family of writers, per se, but a lot of us seem to enjoy it; rather, a lot of us seem to have a need for it. It's therapeutic, cathartic, creative and fulfilling. Aunt Kay's journals. My dad's long, heartfelt messages in greeting cards and emails. We have things to say.

I started journaling in middle school and kept at it through my first couple years of college. I like looking back at what I wrote because there is never a more honest recollection of a person's thoughts or feelings about things than in his or her secret diary. For the most part, I've always seemed to write about what is annoying to me at a particular moment. But these are not stories. They are mostly just rants, and nobody wants to read that. In order to consider themes and whatnot for this fiction story I want to write, I must look at the people who I've known and the places I have been and the struggles I have had with those people and places and turn them into productive life lessons. I am going to attempt a cathartic release of things I have learned that could be used in a fiction story:

• In kindergarten, around Halloween, I had to go over a dotted-line drawing of a cat with a black crayon and then color it. Mrs. Sampson handed it back to me with a note in red marker at the top saying some derivative of: "This is a sloppy mess." I was inconsolable. This is a moment I can look back on to know I take criticism very personally. 
• In first grade, my best friend was a tiny blonde girl who would periodically decide she didn't like me and cast dirty looks my way on random days of the week. In the second grade, I made a new best friend. In the third grade, she approached me in the cafeteria to say that she would be joining the popular table from then on out. From these childhood traumas, I am left with a few plausible conclusions: a) little girls are horrible to each other; b) I must have done something awful to deserve the looks; or c) I was not very fun to have lunch with. Of course, I know the real answer is secret option d) I was chubby, and chubby girls are decidedly uncool and always will be. 
• In middle school, I didn't have a best friend and I didn't care. All I was worried about was not having a locker partner on the first day of school, or having a locker partner decide she didn't want to be my locker partner anymore at the last minute. This never happened. I had the same locker partner for all three years, and it was fine. But things could have turned out differently - I knew this - and the possibility of standing idiotically alone on the first day of school and being randomly placed with another forlorn loser was the most terrifying thing in the world to me. I can look back on this and understand that I will probably always have intense anxiety about things that are unbelievably not worth having intense anxiety about. *Note to my locker partner: Thank you. I'm glad we're still friends.
• The summer after 7th grade (I think it was), I decided it was time to experiment with anorexia. People seem to believe anorexic girls starve themselves because it is the one thing in their lives they think they have control over. I can't speak for all of us, but this was definitely not the only thing I wanted to control. I had a variety of goals in mind. First, I was tired of being the chubby girl. Second, I wanted to become very good at tennis, and this involved a lot of exercising. Third, I had an unofficial competition with my cousin, Karen, with this unofficial title: Who can eat less? We both did very well and I am not sure who won. In all seriousness, girls should really stop starving themselves. But I guess I've been there so I can sympathize with the neurotic urges. I just can't get around how terribly sad and unnecessary it is, though, because of what I ultimately learned from my minor experience: Being too skinny does not result in happiness, attractiveness, or a boyfriend.
• I joined the swim team in 9th grade. I never properly learned how to dive, even though I kept swimming for all four years. Each time after, "Swimmer, take your mark, beeeeep," there was a definite slap on the water, a bellyflop of sorts, that never got me off to a great start. My first meet was the worst, though. My mom is more embarrassed about it than me, because she had to watch from the stands. I blame the coach. She told me, "You know, Beth, I have most of my beginners start with their arms raised high above their heads. In a point, already in dive position. Why don't you try that?" Yeah, why not? Gripping the starting block like a real swimmer would have added another step I didn't want to think about coordinating. So I stood on the block and raised my arms up high in a point, like the five-year-olds my coach was apparently used to working with. Everyone else was bent over, cold-blue fingers clutching the edge of the block, ready to spring off into the water like, well, racers. I doubt I even really bent my knees. Take your mark, GO! My mom is still mortified for me to this day. Swimming taught me that it is okay to look like an idiot sometimes. 
• Tennis started to wear on me as I neared the end of my high school years. It was Aunt Dana who first got me to look into triathlons, because she wanted to do one herself. We signed up for the Fort Collins Club sprint triathlon, the race to occur in May of 2007. I was 16. The swim didn't worry me (I wouldn't have to dive!). I had a mountain bike. I had ran the Bolder Boulder one time with my cousin, Karl. Clearly, I was destined to be a triathlete. I didn't do amazingly, obviously, on my 50-pound bike, but this race changed my life. If not for it, I would never have bought a road bike, joined the cross country team, trained for and completed a full marathon, or joined the club triathlon team at CSU (and therefore never have met Adam, who is wonderfully patient and kind and helpful with things like fixing flat tires and writing training plans for me to loosely follow). Triathlons have taught me that endurance is extremely important and satisfying, and that you just might meet the love of your life if you join a group of like-minded people. 

This post will be continued, because I have continued to learn things about myself and others. I did not have a plan when I started writing this particular post. That is the wonderfully liberating thing about writing. If you allow it to be, it is effortless.

The First Line

I find it very difficult to start writing. Erik and I can commiserate. I think he's interested in fiction for the challenge of it, maybe the beauty of it; so many people can become engrossed and connected to a story that is about something that didn't happen and people who don't exist. I love fiction. My professor for Recent Poetry of the United States (a poet himself) said fiction writers make all the money. This was a joke that came up recurrently in that class, one that all we liberal arts undergraduates would chortle good naturally about as if it was some natural fate we all understood about ourselves: Our degree is not appropriate for a lucrative career. This professor wrote really impressive poems, I'm sure. I never read them. I try to read poems and understand them or at least like them, but most of them are so entirely weird that they just make me feel stupid and like I should have studied marketing or something normal like that. Anyway, he had his collections published in books, but it is people who write fiction who have slim chances at making money from it. I am interested in writing fiction, but I wonder if I'd be very good at it at all.

Erik thinks the first line is very important, and we laugh about it, but I think he's right.

We arrived late to the campsite.

Was that the line you had in Tucson last month, Erik? The next lines are more difficult to come by, because the story is beginning, something needs to start happening, characters need to start being "developed." Are you supposed to map it out like in elementary school when we used to write stories with beginnings, middles, and ends?

It was ok, because the others were already there with the keg. Everyone knows how that story goes.

It's a fun exercise, at least, to think of how a reader might first be introduced into your fictional world. I'll try some first lines right now:

Genevieve was the first one who noticed something was different.

Good parents are not supposed to lie to their children.

My mother told me the thing I will never forget on my thirteenth birthday. 

I ate the apple he was saving for his lunch; I ate it and I am not sorry. 

I am just being ridiculous. Those were the first things that popped into my head; and that's the ridiculous part, how they popped. That's not authentic. I get wrapped up in the thought that I want to be a writer without putting much consideration into what kind of writer I really am. I guess I've expressed interest in it from a young age, and my mom has always told me to write things down before I forget about them.

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