early writings

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