Last summer, I contacted the fine folks at Proxart to see if I could begin submitting work every now and then. I used to write often and had grown busy with music, but this seemed like a pretty great way to get back into the practice of the written work.
We decided my first piece should be an opinion piece, and I was so excited. Brilliant ideas abounded! I couldn’t wait to start.
I sat down one August afternoon with a fresh white Microsoft ’08 Word document blazing back at me. “Alright,” I thought optimistically, “I know how to do this. I was about 250 words in, when, as you may already suspect, Word crashed. Everything was gone.*
Dammit.
My remedy? A physical notebook, of course. When is the last time your notebook crashed and deleted all your work? Never! So, on an early September morning, I boarded my Continental Airlines flight and took out my yellow steno notepad that I had been jotting down lyrics in for about a year, and began to write. The words flowed. There is nothing in this world like that scratch of the pen on the paper, am I right?
But damn my A.D.D. and damn that seat back pocket. Yes, you know the one. The one you stuff your M&Ms wrapper in midflight, the one you squish your $5 water bottle into so that it presses back against your knee during the entire flight, the one you stash your yellow steno notepad in. The one you abandon your yellow steno notepad in.
Dammit.
Upon re-telling the story (which is code for fishing for sympathy), I was met with, “Don’t you know not to do that? Haven’t you read Bono’s book? He did that once. So did Butch Walker. Everyone knows not to take out a notebook during a flight.”
Well, I didn’t get that memo. I bet that memo got left in a seat back pocket.
But the third time is supposed to be a charm, right? Since Word had failed me, I figured TextEdit was a trusty no-frills way to write. It wasn’t created by Microsoft and I couldn’t store it in a seat back pocket of any kind. So one sunny November afternoon, I took a deep breath, and once again began to write. Until I spilled my coffee onto my computer and fried the entire thing.
I texted Proxart’s director a few days later to tell him this ridiculous tale. He pointed out that my story was sort of like the adult version of “my dog ate my homework.” I’m sure if I had a dog, he would have eaten my notebook. Or my computer, given my track record.
This morning I woke up and saw some Proxart tweets about new writers and how excited they were, and I was filled with an equal and opposite reaction of resentment that these writers were succeeding at the very basic steps of writing: preserving your work long enough to submit it. I thought about how I didn’t even want to write those opinion pieces now; they were probably bad ideas anyway. I thought about how ridiculous this little plight of mine had been, and wondered how I would ever write anything good about an artist and their environment, given my terrible luck.
Bit then it hit me: maybe this struggle actually is part of my environment. Maybe from time to time our circumstances make up our environment more than our physical surroundings do. Maybe the dumb stubbornness that drove me to write the same article over and over again is the true picture of how I am interacting with my environment. Maybe the art is in our perseverance, our endless small battles against technology and absentmindedness, and our response to the obvious notion to quit. Maybe the story isn’t the original idea, but the process of fighting to get that idea on paper.
Maybe the process is the art, and the end product is just that: the end product.
A small wave of panic just washed over me as I realized I’ve yet to save this draft since I started writing. Don’t judge me too quickly, this time I’m using Google Docs. But with my luck, Google’s servers are probably crashing now, so please excuse me while I print, e-mail, photograph, fax, laminate, and bury a copy of this draft in someone’s back yard…
*Editor’s note: My own computer crashed while reading this paragraph. A sign? Maybe. Is Julie cursed? It’s possible.
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For more information on the author, visit JulieBelle.com.