Recently I have been going through my books. Books are one of my vices–one of the things I collect, most of them to fill up spaces without any adequate justification. A lot of books have a more sentimental than truly useful attachments. I tell myself there are worse vices than covering your walls with sentimental things to stare at. True. But there are times when you need to pare back, and show a little restraint.
Over the years I have preserved quite a collection of “how-to-write” books. I’ve bought very few. Most of my assortment are books my father collected over the course of his college education, many of them I don’t think he bought, either. (I inherited my book collecting from someone.) They are the college sort of text book: how to write an essay, how to write clearly, how to write a sentence.
I never read a single one of those freely collected books. Oh, I flipped most of them open and read for a bit, captivated by the perfect sentences telling how to write the perfect words. Some people think of sentences as just existing. They are–and so long as they have a beginning and an end they are sufficient. But I think sentences can be like art–beautifully written, and well crafted. And, by the same measure, ugly, and poorly put together. Most people don’t think about this, don’t even consider the possibility, but to some measure nearly everyone senses better writing when they read it, and something in them approves.
I have some ability to innately produce better writing–that is why people read what I write and say, “You are a writer.” But for some reason I don’t refer to a book as to how to do it. To me that would be like trying to follow an instruction manual on panting. You paint what you see. You paint what is inside you. You don’t paint the instructions in a book. Likewise, I write what I see, I write what is inside me, and I don’t think about following the instructions in books. There is no book that taught me how to write. But there are books which do make me stop and think about beautiful sentences, and I liked to think that one day I would stop and read all those books, and that somehow then I would write the most beautiful sentences.
Instead, I just wrote, and I still write, and I never read the books. And I know that I never will read the books. It is fun to think about beautiful sentences, but that isn’t my life. My life is more dirty and broken and less than perfect, and will never be filled with readings about writing perfect sentences.
There were a lot of books that just needed to be thrown out.
So I finally made myself throw them out.
I like to think I am teaching myself discipline.
A little bit.
. . . I also threw out some of my old drafts of writing. This was hard. Very hard, in a way.
Every draft of any book I have written represents a huge amount of work. I invested hours upon hours, days upon days, into writing that draft, and then I spent more time laboriously reading over what I had written, and marking all sorts of corrections on the draft. Those drafts are my history, on the most personal level. The silently chart my writing struggle and agony.
They are the opposite (and yet the very same thing) as the books about “how to write.” One is theory, the other is practice. One is beautiful in its abstraction, the other ugly in its stumbling reality. But the ugly stumbling one is me.
I liked to imagine that some day I would go back through all of my old drafts, read them over, remember, and marvel at how far I had come, and laugh at the foolish struggling person I had been. It is nice to get a feeling for the trek of improvement you have walked in life, especially if you are inclined to think dour thoughts about yourself, as I am.
But I knew I would never go back and read all the drafts. When you have many drafts of one book–equaling to thousands upon thousands of pages–I know that really I will never have the time to go back through all of that writing. The most I can really justify saving is one old draft from any book I have written. And really, even that is foolish. I struggle as it is to go back and read the finished product of past things I have written.
So I made myself throw out some old drafts. I made myself admit that much of the past is really gone, never to be recalled and remembered. I still need to throw away more old drafts, but that means going up into the attic, or digging under my bed.
One of the most recent things I threw away was an old Writer’s Market. It wasn’t quite so hard as my writing drafts, but the act had its own nostalgia. It was a bit like throwing out a book of dreams. It wasn’t so painful, because I already knew the dream had died, a long time ago. But still, remembering the musty memories of those years ago, it made me feel a bit old, and lost from that simpler, familiar, past.
Writer’s Market, for those of you who don’t know, was a big book released every year, listing all sorts of places you could sell your writing. From time to time I would go through my copy, dreaming of publishing success. I never ended up actually using it that much, though when I threw it out there were still a collection of bookmarks sticking up.
I won’t be making my fame and fortune from that path anymore. But even if I would, it wouldn’t be through a huge paperback volume of market listings. The Internet has replaced such large volumes of musty pages. More than any other book, I couldn’t pretend there was any practical value left in that massive book. History–both my history, and the history of publishing–had marched on. I remember that time, and yet it is so far gone now it is alien.
There was not enough reason to save such a large book just to remember that wistful, hopeful, time in my life. I have enough other things to remind me of that.
So I threw the book out.
