{"id":24,"date":"2011-08-14T16:01:28","date_gmt":"2011-08-14T21:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jackcampbelljr.wordpress.com\/?p=24"},"modified":"2011-08-14T16:01:28","modified_gmt":"2011-08-14T21:01:28","slug":"mirrors-to-remind-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/2011\/08\/14\/mirrors-to-remind-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"Mirrors to Remind Ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a quote in the movie Memento.\u00a0 “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are.”\u00a0 I thought of that movie in relation to writing, just recently.<\/p>\n

I was shocked to realize that I did not have a copy of any of my writing from my college creative writing courses on my laptop.\u00a0 In a panic, I checked my USB drives.\u00a0 No luck.\u00a0 I’d erased all of them at one point or another for large files needed for work.\u00a0 My desktop computer had recently decided it’s motherboard was of no use to it anymore, and in turn, was no use to me.<\/p>\n

In a last ditch effort, I headed to the garage.\u00a0 There, beneath the piles of corrugated cardboard boxes from Amazon that I always mean to recycle was my old laptop, which I had always meant to erase.<\/p>\n

That laptop has a sort of sentimentality to me.\u00a0 A majority of my writing has been done on that device.\u00a0 Up until a year ago, it had been my faithful companion since 2002.\u00a0 The case is worn, dark tarnished spots mark the perfect outline of where my palms rested on the keyboard.\u00a0 There were keys missing, an unfortunate side effect of letting my son near it as a curious two year old.\u00a0 The case was heavy, which what its only redeeming quality, since technology had rendered it nearly as useless as a paperweight.<\/p>\n

But, booting it up…slowly…waiting…until…finally, there they where, copies of my work.\u00a0 Not everything I had written, but a large chunk of it.\u00a0 Catastrophe diverted.<\/p>\n

I was shocked to find, going through the file names, that I didn’t remember writing many of them.\u00a0 I could even tell you the premise of half of the stories.\u00a0 I found myself thinking of Hemingway, whose wife Hadley lost all a suitcase full of his unpublished fiction.\u00a0 Hemingway had been devastated, and blamed her for the loss.\u00a0 I now understood how he felt.<\/p>\n

I am not Hemingway, not even close, and I had no one to blame but my own carelessness, but opening one of the stories and reading a few paragraphs, I quickly realized that I could never have reproduced them.<\/p>\n

I am a different person and a different writer.\u00a0 I was Leonard from Memento, looking in the mirror at the words I had written, trying to remember what had made me put them there in the first place, trying to decode what they meant to me and why they had been important.\u00a0 I have never been one for photo albums, I have never understood them.\u00a0 I know where I have been and who I have met.\u00a0 But looking at the writing was to remember who I had been.\u00a0 They are the mirror I need to remember who I am.<\/p>\n

We all need our metaphorical mirrors, whether they are photos, trophies, writing, collections, or simply fond memories.\u00a0 We have to know where we have been if we are ever going to figure out where we are going.<\/p>\n

I am looking forward to re-writing a few of the stories.\u00a0 I have no doubt the re-writes will be drastically different than the first drafts, as there is a drastically different writer looking at them.\u00a0 Still, it should be fun to look back on the young man I once was and see what the man I am today thinks of him.<\/p>\n

Hopefully, they get along.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Lost Files by Peter Hoey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Writing:\u00a0 Finished two short stories, re-writing two others.<\/p>\n

Recently Read:\u00a0 Strunk and White’s Elements of Style<\/p>\n

Started Reading:\u00a0 Vs. Reality by Blake Northcott<\/p>\n

Recently Seen:\u00a0 Super, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a quote in the movie Memento.\u00a0 “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are.”\u00a0 I thought of that movie in relation to writing, just recently. I was shocked to realize that I did not have a copy of any of my writing from my college creative writing courses on my laptop.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[95,96,132,136,166,176,208,216,217,225,261,297,304,352,410,418],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-creative","tag-creativity","tag-fiction","tag-files","tag-hemingway","tag-image","tag-lost","tag-memento","tag-memory","tag-mirrors","tag-past","tag-re-writing","tag-reproduction","tag-stories","tag-work","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jackcampbelljr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}