Pretending to Write

 It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them. ~ (Isabel Colegate)



Lo and behold: beautiful notebooks in my possession. There are four of them in the picture, and three of them are sadly still empty.


From left to right, they are:
(1) A notebook from Chicfuschia, with light blue cover. I am not sure whether it's an A4 notebook, but it sure looks big. And thick. I often take it out of my drawer and look at it admiringly, but am still intimidated at the thought that it will take years to fill in.


(2) Another notebook from Chicfuschia, it's red and small, and whenever I touch it I tell myself that I can fill up the entire book in no time. I am lying: it has been almost six months and the book is still blank. I got notebook (1) and (2) as a birthday gift in August 2012, and considering it is now January 2013 and both notebooks are blank, you can guess who has not been writing diligently.

(3) This is a beautiful black Moleskine notebook that R gave me for my birthday in...2011. Instead of immediately writing in it, I thought long and hard about what to write. Actually too long, and too hard. Needless to say, 1.5 years after the beautiful thing landed on my palms, it is still empty.

(4) A thin notebook with brown cover, I bought this myself in July 2012. Since it is thin, I thought I could fill it up in a month or so. Ha! So far I have written a short story and scattered some sentences here and there, unable to fill up merely 10 pages of the seemingly thin book.

I am currently using another notebook shown on the right, which R bought me in 2010.
I needed almost 3 months before I dared writing anything on it. I was so nervous about writing in it, afraid of making grammatical errors, afraid of having nothing to say. I finally wrote down my first entry in the notebook on November 2010, and now there are only 6 blank pages left. I cannot believe it has taken 2 years and still the notebook is not completely filled up.

I am thinking of several 2013 resolutions for my writing life:
1. Fill up my old notebook
2. Start writing in my blank notebooks

I shall blog about how I am doing in these resolutions.

One note though:

In my ripe old age I have learned that speaking in front of a classroom full of raging young adults may be scary. Making mistakes while teaching may be scary. One thing that is absolutely, completely scary, however, is showing up and put your thoughts on a blank page.