I wrote a piece an hour or so ago, a longer piece, almost 250 words, and I thought, good, I’m writing something a bit more developed than my usual quick stabs at finding the words to express something, but just as I was copying it into an email to send to Marta, I had the thought, wait, did I write this piece, well, not this piece, but a similar piece, for one of the other months? So I pulled up my five Word files, one for each previous month of daily writing for Marta’s blog, and found that, yes, indeed, I had written about this same thing back in September, using different words of course, but basically a piece about the same situation, the same scene, with the same resolution, the same ending. The writing was triggered today, as it had been back in September, by Marta writing about meeting her “bad boyfriend” in Washington Square Park. And I’d thought, oh, that’s where an important scene with my own bad boyfriend had played out, in Washington Square Park. I’m like the old man who tells the same stories over and over to his (one hopes) tolerant grandchildren. I have my own war stories and the Battle of Washington Square Park was a deciding event in my early 20s. No wonder I keep coming back to it.
Yes, these meaningful stories come back and back don't they. I am sorry we missed the rejected piece. No matter if the subject matter is being revisited.
ReplyDeleteCertain stories never go away, it seems. They're important, and each telling is different, even if the basic structure is the same. And yet it is so understandable to be concerned -- oh, have I already told this? But this is a good place to revisit things if they surface. We are all experimenting.
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