Notes On Owning Things
I should be making stuff, not keeping stuff.
My closet is full of boxes. In those boxes are old RPG books, collected over twenty years. This isn’t some fine collection, though. These are used books with bent corners. These are used games with dented boxes. These aren’t collectibles. I don’t really know what they are.
It’s not just the boxes of RPG books. These are just the straws that are breaking my back. I’ve got stacks of old papers, notebooks, note cards, notepads, filled with notes for games and books that one day I thought I might write. All of these competing with the notes I put down daily in my Moleskine — the ideas I now think I might write. How long do I hold on to a stack of notes before I accept one of two truths:
- The idea is not getting written.
- The idea is absorbed enough into my imagination that it’ll surface one day, notes or no notes.
The idea, I suppose, was that I’d keep all these worn books and old video games and ill-kept comics and pile them up. Then I’d climb the pile and, from there, reach my potential. Never happened.
That’s just not how these things work. Nothing but the work is the work. If I’m not actually writing these stories, keeping their notes is demonstrably not helping them get written. Yes, I should be writing more (and writing harder), but I don’t think that precludes it being a good idea for me to get read of so much of this junk.
I look at pictures of people’s workspaces and homes on Flickr and Tumblr, where people sometimes circulate little pictures of their idyllic, minimalist lives, and I see how little people really need to have around them to do well. I see people who don’t need to keep a grip on books they’ve read… just to prove they’ve read them.
I think of myself when I travel, and how happy I am and how little I need to take with me to be that happy.
But I’m a keeper, from a family of keepers. I hold on to magazines, just in case I’ll need a piece of information in them, just in case this is the one that contains the edge I need to get ahead. Just in case.
Worse than that, I hold on to things because I think they’ll demonstrate who I am. (To whom? I don’t know.) Why is it not enough for me to be a fan of something… why do I need to prove it with some half-assed collection of comics or novels or reference books? I mean, I know I’m not my khakis. I know that. And yet.
The things you own don’t just end up owning you, they bury you.
Imagine distant archaeologists busting open my nerdy tomb to discover that I chose to be buried with six boxes of dog-eared Dragonlance modules and manhandled Wraith books. Those pith-helmeted bastards would think they’re disappointed, but I’d still be the sorry schmuck with thought that a complete collection of Castle Falkenstein books would make him look like the king of all nerds. My tomb is a burial mound made out of stacks of notes for unwritten novels and games, and it’s unclear whether or not I’ve been buried alive.
The real problem here is that I feel like a rube. I look at all these old RPG books and I think of how many times I spent money as soon as it came in just so I could secure my identity as a fan of Vampire or whatever. As if owning the old TSR Indiana Jones RPG and feeling like a truer fan has done me any real good.
I look at those books, now, and I see the money that could’ve been spent on a new computer or — and this is almost always the real rub — a trip somewhere. My fondest memories aren’t of reading RPG books or completing a collection. My fondest memories are of people, of meeting people, of talking and walking and traveling to new or familiar places. And now I look at my closet and I see boxes of money turned into boxes of beaten-up things that can’t help me get airfare or a hotel stay. I see a lot of bad decisions in all those pretty books.
How long do I have to hold on to a book before it’s finally absorbed into my identity? How many do I need to stay a book person? The answer, of course, is that the question is bullshit. But that doesn’t stop it from entering my head. The only solution I know, right now, is to get rid of some of this old junk… and get writing.
But this week, my copy of Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 came in the mail. With it was a book of Icelandic sagas, bought to get free shipping. The books took a trip, but I stay the same guy in the same place.
If I had to guess, I’d say this post is half as good as the first one I wrote in its place… which Wordpress ate. In fact, I sort of hate this one, but at least it’s written.
Still pretty good for those of us who don’t live inside your head.
For the record, I regularly purge my shelves of Stuff I Don’t Need To Hold On To anymore, and I still can’t bring myself to get rid of my complete set of Castle Falkenstein books.
It may be rewritten, but it’s still well said.
You aren’t alone: As someone who spent last weekend sorting through books I’ve owned since I was six and boxes of notebooks and notecards accumulated over the last twenty years, I fully empathize.
I hold on to the old books, comics and RPGs longer than I should as well. In most cases, these are simply the physical reminders of some fantastic times. Those experiences are worth as much as the trips I’vehad.
This is a transformation I’ve been going through. I have about six heavy boxes downstars ready to go to used bookstores or goodwill. It contains some memorable reads, but… I just can’t keep them all.
I keep non-fiction, because I am amazed at how often I go through those books.
My fiction books and game books — ultimately, I realized I was imprisoning them more than anything. Time to let them free and run wild in the minds — and libraries — of others.
It’s a slow cleanse, but a certain one.
Well-said, by the by.
– c.
My answer might be biased here — I live my life surrounded by books. I’ve made a career of it. If someone asks what I do, I give them the answer they’re actually asking for (what I do to earn my paycheck) and append “I’m a bookseller” to the end of it, because that’s the part of the job that makes me happy, even if these days I’m a step removed from the bookstore itself.
I see nothing wrong with you holding on to your books and notebooks. I have at least three blank books I’ve bought because I thought I might like to write something in them. There are countless other, cheaper notebooks (and legal pads, and ATM receipts with scrawled bits of dialogue…) strewn around here with things I’ve jotted down to use “later.” I have a folder with character sheets and game notes from ten years ago that I still flip through every now and then, because god damn, the story is still with me even though the campaign is long over.
Books are both leisure and research for me. I like seeing others at their craft and hoping that somewhere along the way, I’ll learn from it. I could probably point to five books on my shelves that I’ll reread again and again, but keep those and pare down the rest of the collection, even by a quarter? /shudder. Can’t do it.
Flickr photosets tend to show some really sleek spaces, but most of the ones I’ve seen are for home offices in general, not necessarily specific to writers. Have you seen Where I Write? Books, everywhere.
I look at Michael Swanwick’s office and breathe a sigh of relief.
Thanks, y’all, for writing. Nicole, I wouldn’t wish the inside of my own head on you, believe me.
Seth, it was my own safari through my own jungle last weekend that sparked this nonsense. ‘Tis the season, I guess.
The difference between the writers on “Where I Write” and, for example, me is this: They are established. They are presumably happy where they live and get to travel around, away from their stuff, if they feel like it.
I feel like I’ll never get out of here unless I am ready to pick up and move at a moment’s warning. And that I’ll be left shattered when I am inevitably burgled, even though I a) shouldn’t be so defined by what I own, and b) don’t own much worth stealing anyway.
Of course, I oscillate. I own all this junk because sometimes I think it’s a form of expression, owning things. But I think I am probably wrong about that.
>The difference between the writers on “Where I Write” and, for example, me is this:
>They are established. They are presumably happy where they live and get to travel
>around, away from their stuff, if they feel like it.
Don’t believe it. Creators are not happy people. Ugly Hill will show you the truth!
http://www.uglyhill.com/d/20080619.html
When my basement flooded and my diaries and letters and, yes, story notes from HIGH SCHOOL were in peril, I was appalled.
-G.
[...] (This calls to mind a different-but-related idea put forth by Will Hindmarch — “I should be making stuff, not keeping stuff.”) [...]
I went through a bout of “why do I need this crap?” last year, and one answer I didn’t expect surfaced: I need to be surrounded by ideas that affected me because I need to loan them to others. I buy books that I’ve already read because I want to be able to share them with others. Those ideas got into my headspace, and I get something out of putting them into others’.
I have no idea if that helps you at all, but it’s a perspective I hadn’t heard.
Greg, I’d be appalled, too. But just because it hurts to get rid of them (or to lose them unwillingly) doesn’t mean I won’t be better off without so much stuff in my pack. You’re spot-on about miserable creators, though — and if even creating as much as you do doesn’t satiate, I have to assume nothing will.
Paul, I’m a big loaner. I get that same creative rush out of knowing that somebody is getting to see or read something for the first time. I’ve even given away (signed, sigh) copies of books to people who really should read them because I knew, just knew, they weren’t going to return them. Keeping stuff just so I can loan it would be fine, and I suppose that’s one reason I have so many DVDs, but ain’t nobody gonna be borrowing these old Wraith books from me. Everyone I know in this city is either not a gamer or doesn’t need more books, either. So it goes.
I think I’ve just got to accept that I have a bunch of shit to move if and when I get to move, or I’ve got to shed some layers.
I once read that Paulo Coelho left his finished/read books in random places, like on train seats. I always liked this idea.
Anisa, that’s terrific. I’m just too possessive for that, but not so proud of it that I can’t wish I wasn’t.