I had a drawing teacher in college who told us a story about Picasso that I’m not sure is true. He said that one of Picasso’s friends was visiting, and during the visit he spilled some coffee. Picasso grabbed a handful of drawings to mop up the spill. Picasso’s friend started freaking out, asking him how he could do that to his own work. Apparently, Picasso laughed and told him he had so much work that it didn’t matter. They were just sketches, and they were crap anyway.
My Great Aunt Clarie told me never to throw away any of my writing.
Guess which advice stuck.
I keep all of my old writing in boxes that are shoved into an old entertainment stand at my childhood home. The first time I went through all of it, I covered at least half of my bedroom floor, which was a feat, because the bedroom I shared with my sister was the entire finished attic of our house.
In that entertainment stand is probably a thousand pages of fanfic alone. I also found angsty teenage poetry, short stories, and what may be part of a musical. Some of it is unreadable because I wrote it in pencil and it faded away. Sometimes it’s not even on full sheets of paper, just torn sheets of notebook paper with a sentence scribbled on it, or some of the many lists of story ideas that I would write during slow nights at the bookstore I’ve worked at on-and-off for the last 6 years. I re-read a lot of it as I organized it, and let me tell you something:
It’s all crap.
I also can’t bring myself to throw it away. My weird justification for keeping all this junk is so I can see my progress. Every crappy fanfic, every fragmented sentence was practice for this thing. This thesis. At some point I hope to look at this and see how I progress from here, hopefully with less embarrassment than my other writings, because I am rather fond of these 139 pages.
My point, I guess, is that I’ve been doing this for a long time, but somehow this still feels like the beginning.
This is part 6/6 of the preface to my MFA thesis. Click below to read other parts as they are posted.
Part 2: Finding the Cabin in the Woods
Part 3: The Irrational Fear of Genre
Part 4: Taking Stones from Pockets
Part 6: I am not Picasso
Sad Magical Creatures 