The Problem with Pencils
Much to my delight I came across some old work that I had done in High School yesterday.
(Just from that sentence, you know this post is about to become Hilarious. I mean, Who did we think we were in High School? I thought I was all that. I was so awesome at writing, pretty good in math, knew my history, Sang like an Angel, etc… This is about to get amazing.)
Truth Time: It wasn’t a school project, or homework that I found, it was a 10+page story. Ah, the glories of teenage fiction (laughing yet? just wait…). The Heroine is a fairy named after none other than myself (of course) and the hero in the story is a Prince who, of course, is named after a silly boy. Also making appearances are a sickly King, an Evil Uncle and a Huge Fox. A HUGE FOX! That is some serious imagination. His name is Tarnick. Who in their right mind thinks to themselves, “in this story there is going to be a large fox whose name is Tarnick? That’s an original name!” Apparently I did. Because lo and behold I have a story about it, which includes a very bad sketch of the world they lived in.
Now the sketch and half of the pages are written in pencil. WHAT WAS I THINKING? I was an IDIOT! yYu never write in PENCIL! Because 2 things could happen:
1) It smudges into an illegible smudge.
2) Someone could take an eraser and just erase all of the awful awesomeness.
ok. I’m not that old, and not that far out of high school and from writing that. And yet, I can see now that the words are becoming blurry and hard to read. In another couple of years it really will be a smudge. And then, where would you be? Where would I be? Never able to recall what those words said. OR, My sisters could be going through my stuff when I am old and dead and they could just erase it just as Cassandra burned Jane Austen’s letters (so sad).
Thankfully I wrote the 2nd half in pen. I love ink. You can’t erase. You can cross out, and rewrite, but no erasing. You can see the errors and the corrections.
Silly to Serious: We need to write our life stories in ink. Did you read that? INK. We shouldn’t be writing in pencil. We can’t live our lives believing everything we do will eventually be smudged out or erased. With ink, we can see where we have messed up, and we can correct it! We can look back at our lives and see where things have changed, and been made better.
When we write our lives with ink, it shows that we aren’t afraid of our mistakes and of covering them up. Today, I came across some craft instructions I had written in a hurry. There were two HUGE mistakes in it. I spelled Bags, bahs. And I spelled glue, slue. Now if that had been written in pencil I could have just erased it. Pretended it never happened. But, it was typed in INK, and so I had to go into the computer files, find it, and fix the error. I had to fix the problem, I couldn’t just write over it. Ink requires us to change the original work. We aren’t just putting a band-aid over the problem, but taking medicine so we don’t have to worry about it ever again.
Writing in ink takes courage, but never fear, you won’t regret it. It may take time if you are used to writing in pencil. But when you write with ink, you are less afraid to start over, and more careful with what you do, and what you say. So write in ink. Just do it.
Post Script: In true Emma fashion, I’m going to type up my story and preserve it. But, also in true Emma fashion, you aren’t going to be reading it on this blog. Some things (yes, this includes this silly story) are not meant to be read until I’m dead. I also should mention, the story isn’t finished. The story ends in a horrible spot and there’s no clear connections between half of things said in the story. But I’m gonna preserve it. and then… edit it and finish it (looking upwards with my guilty face on here). Yes, you read that correct. I need to finish more things that I start, even if it means trying to finish a goofy story. Will I actually do this? Maybe. Because it’d be pretty dang fun. And I LIKE fun! Here goes nothing…
