Introduction to Insights

Today’s selec­tion will be the last of the high school prose I’m going to dredge up. It is the intro­duc­tion to a com­pi­la­tion of mate­r­ial (I called the col­lec­tion “Insights”) I wrote for my high school cre­ative writ­ing class. I am in awe of it. I apol­o­gize in advance. Tomor­row: poetry. Beware.

To the Reader:

As I begin gath­er­ing mate­r­ial for the first accu­mu­lated body of work that I have attempted, a thou­sand thoughts and ques­tions flow through my mind. Never-ending armies of inse­cu­ri­ties run in streams, but are dashed against an unseen wall, the cer­tainty that I know what I am doing. Poten­tial selec­tions rise up to meet me from the past. Half-written sto­ries that I never got around to fin­ish­ing come back to me, ask­ing if now is the time to com­plete the vision. I am com­pelled to bring them to life each time I write. They nag at me, gen­tly tug­ging the shirt sleeve in the back of my mind. Do I include every­thing, since this is the first? Or do I embrace the new ideas that I have pitched around in my head but have been hes­i­tant to start? I must con­sider my audi­ence. My early writ­ings I have buried, hid­den from the rest of an unfor­giv­ing world. They are lost in the anonymity of the past, but I know where they are. I know how to find them. Do I risk bring­ing old ghosts back from the dead? At one point I wrote because I felt I was haunted. I wanted to slay my demons, the pen my only weapon against them. Those excerpts from my life, the begin­ning and learn­ing process that my writ­ing went through, do they remain unpol­ished, imma­ture tid­bits of a pre­ten­tious mind? Or should I taint them with a flair of my cur­rent mind­set? They remain untouched, as they were writ­ten. There is some­thing hon­est in them, some­thing inno­cent, and I believed in them at the time. If that makes me unpol­ished or pre­ten­tious dur­ing those years of my life then so be it. I accept that as yet another dif­fi­cult stage of my youth.

Now on to the greater topic at hand. Of the count­less poten­tial new com­po­si­tions at my dis­posal, which ones do I feel com­pelled to com­pose? If I select some­thing safe, sim­ple, or in the same vein as some pre­vi­ous work, I fear I would not escape the notion that I had cheated myself and my audi­ence. There­fore it is my hope that the few who are famil­iar with my writ­ing will find some­thing unex­pected, a new style that I have not attempted before. I see this as an oppor­tu­nity to exper­i­ment, not only in new realms of writ­ing but in new thoughts as well. It is my hope that through these new writ­ings I might dis­cover some­thing about myself pre­vi­ously hid­den from my view, and I invite my audi­ence to do the same. These are my thoughts as I begin this writ­ing project. My work does not undergo major revi­sion; rarely do I even read my own writ­ings once they are fin­ished. This keeps the idea fresh for me, for if the idea itself becomes stale, how could the exe­cu­tion of that idea be oth­er­wise? There­fore the ideas and the con­tent selected for this col­lec­tion are as close to my orig­i­nal con­cep­tion of them as pos­si­ble. I sub­mit this effort to the reader, and whether it is accepted or not I stand by it as I have all of my writ­ten work. You, the reader, will find every­thing you seek here, no mat­ter how ambi­tious your quest.

Yours,

David E. Mahaffey

1996