La Vie Boheme

I started with writing and wound up with cultural identity

I may have found the secret to getting past the block I wrote about yesterday. Work on something else, and quit worrying about whether what I'm working on is a novel or a short story or whatever. For both Girls With Glasses and the once-again-untitled-Appalachian project, I was so caught up in "this isn't a good opening scene for a short story/novel/whatever" that I couldn't fall into the story. I'm back to work on the Appalachian project, and I'm currently just trying to fall into the world, the voices, the characters. I'm trying to shut up the voices that scream about needing to write something publishable.

I need to write something true. That's my priority. GWG didn't feel true, for all that it was purportedly autobiographical. This Appalachian project feels true. It feels honest. Even if it sucks, and even if nobody ever reads it or enjoys it but me. I feel like I'm getting in touch with a part of who I am, a part I often neglect or make fun of. I feel like I'm lifting up that part of me and saying, "I come from this."

It's weird. It's almost as if I've unearthed an ethnic heritage of sorts. I guess in a way, I have. I've bitched a lot about not having family traditions, or not having any sort of interesting family history, but that's the thing. My family's heritage isn't interesting to anybody in the family, because it's just what we are. Looking at it from a sort of outside perspective makes it fascinating. Well, fascinating to me, at least. It makes me want to kick myself for not spending more time talking to my grandma's generation while they were still alive and coherent.

I don't know, it's like all I needed was a single morning of listening to real bluegrass music to make me realize that my roots are not like anyone else's I know. I come from a separate cultural group, one with its own history, music, traditions. I've made so many jokes about dumb hicks and white trash and ignorant people and spent so much time being ashamed of it--and there's something to the jokes, definitely, but there's more there.

I'm babbling, and I should get back to writing--which, by the way, it feels good to be doing again. It feels good to write without a specific goal in mind. The goal will show itself eventually.

I think this means "adios, NaNoWriMo". We'll see.