Ruminations on Writing Part Two: The Aggregate Self

Since publishing my last post, I have torn my file cabinets apart. I was looking for a specific journal entry that I remembered writing. I could not find it in my laptop, in my external hard drive, in my various half-filled composition books that date back to 1995. Finally, after nearly a week, I found loose steno pages in a hanging folder titled “Essays/Thoughts.” I don’t have the exact date this would have been composed, but Roland Smith visited Bradley Central somewhere around my fourth year teaching, which would have been around eight years ago. Without digging through school yearbooks (which I don’t have access to at home), I would estimate this entry as having been written in November 2004.

Each book I read inevitably brings me to the same conclusion: “I couldn’t have written that — it’s too good.” This disheartening sentiment serves as a real downer when trying to buoy myself into believing my writings are equal to the task of publication. While listening to young adult author Roland Smith discuss his writing process at an assembly yesterday, I had a realization. A novel (actually, most writing from short story to epic) is written not in an instant, but over an extended period of time. I am, at every instant, a newly realized being who is completely unique from the self of a moment ago. At times I have access to stores of words which will later fall behind the boxes in my mind to be come covered with slimy growth. Perhaps an image from a discussion I listened to on Extension 720 is rioting between my ears and later the same image is deflated and pallid. Simply through life I change moment by moment, and it is this dynamic aggregate of me who is the true author of my writings. Not just the self who exists in this moment, but the accumulation of selves working to construct the words which finally take form. Thus a novel is, in a sense, able to be greater than the man who writes it because that man experiences so much more than a single man’s experiences through the building of the novel. When I am feeling inadequate as I compare myself against a novel, I am actually looking at myself in this moment and comparing me against the aggregate author who is the sum of all his parts and thus vastly wiser than I am.