After finishing the past two days of daily writing, the next thing to do is sort out and archive the files from 2017.
This has long been one of my habits: move everything from the past into a folder marked with a date, then let new work and a new life be carried by a new container. Of course, some things refuse to disappear just because they have been filed away. One of them is the novel-writing plan that was supposed to happen this year.
Around the New Year, people always like to invent little rituals for themselves. These past few days the internet has been full of them: lines like handing "your 2017 self over to 2018 and asking to be treated gently," kneeling in front of a mirror to beg yourself not to repeat certain mistakes next year or to finally accomplish something, or deciding that the first word you see will become your life lesson for 2018.
I say it feels silly, but I still click in and look. Every year I want to see what style or rules people have come up with this time. Sometimes a passing trend, however trivial it seems, might also hint at a business opportunity.
I even tried joining one of those games to see what keyword it would assign to my 2018. In the end, nothing it gave me felt worth believing. The reason is simple: my goals for 2018 are already fairly clear. If I do not see the answer I want, then the game itself immediately starts to feel worthless.
There were other things that needed archiving too. At the end of 2016, I scheduled a time capsule letter to my future self, and it arrived in the last days of December 2017. It was full of expectations for the entire year ahead.
Whether those things were completed or not, those guesses and hopes were only the past version of myself projecting wishes onto the future. If I, the one actually living through it, did not fulfill them, then they remain nothing more than beautiful visions. In the end, what was written still has to be archived, because it belongs to the past. Then I wait for the next future, and try again to complete what I once hoped for.
In that time capsule, I asked myself three questions:
- What is writing to you?
- Have you found your direction as a writer yet? Will you become someone who caters to the public, or a writer who creates mainly for personal satisfaction?
- What do you need to do next?
Before filing that letter away, it seems only right to answer them now—to answer a past self I can never return to.
- Writing is part of life itself. It turns the present into the past, then offers it to the self who will exist later.
- In truth, being a writer for the public and being a writer for oneself are not mutually exclusive. The real difference lies in who your audience is: the people of the present, or people in the future who may use your words as a point of reflection. Neither path is more correct than the other. The question is what kind of effort each requires. One asks you to understand how to meet the times; the other asks you to understand how to let things settle and deepen.
- It is like the revised profile line I wrote for a new stretch of 500 days of writing on LOFTER: why did writing begin, and how long will it continue? It is not really a question, but a murmured statement.
It is time to say goodbye. Archive all of it: the disappointments and the relief, the happiness and the sadness.
December 30, 2017