Writing at 9

So imagine that your 9 y.o. daughter comes to you one day and asks if you'll take her to a music store.  This seems a little strange, because you've never seen her have any interest in music, but of course you won't say no and one afternoon, you and you daughter head off.  You're maybe thinking in your head that instruments cost a lot of money, but maybe there's some kind of installment plan, or maybe after you see if playing an instrument is something that interests her, you can make an arrangement to buy a low-budget version.  For example, I saw a drum kit advertised at a local coffee shop recently for $250 Canadian.

You get to the store and your daughter shows a definite interest in the guitars.  The shop has one she can try, but you have to vouch for her because she's nine.  As she takes the guitar on her lap, however, she does it in a way that makes it seem that she's very familiar with it.  You watch as your daughter automatically tunes the guitar, absolutely engrossed in the activity, and this too seems ... oddly capable.

Then, without warning, without dropping a chord, she launches into Big Yellow Taxi, singing the lyrics spot on, sounding so bloody close to Joni Mitchell that it's freakish ... particularly as you watch your daughter move her fingers along the frets.  You're staring wide-eyed at her; she looks so comfortable playing it might be like she's played the song hundreds of times.  You're so flabbergasted, trying to figure out where this is coming from.  She finishes the Mitchell song and right after, she starts playing Nobody Knows You when You're Down and Out by Eric Clapton ... and you're not sure you know this song.

If you've been reading this series about time travel, then you have some notion of what I'm talking about.  Your 9 y.o. daughter isn't really 9; she's actually someone who aged into being an 81 year old woman who worked as a professional musician for sixty years, steadily building set after set of cover songs for performances she gave at clubs and occasionally on stages.  From her perspective, recently, she found she was dying of cancer and took the opportunity to return to her own 9 y.o. self, some five or six years before the age she was when she actually started learning to play.  She has played Big Yellow Taxi hundreds of times ... and now that she's young again, there's no reason to wait until she's 14; nor does she have to learn how to play.  And you, her parent — who knows none of this, and wouldn't believe it if you were told — have to invent some story to tell yourself that makes what you're seeing and hearing believable.  "Our daughter is a prodigy!" you tell you wife, when you get home.  "You should have seen her.  She was amazing!  I've never seen an adult who could play as well as she does."

Of course, your daughter remembers being fourteen ... and begging you for a guitar, which you resisted because when she first started playing the first time, it didn't sound quite so good.  In fact, she remembers half a dozen conversations you had with her (10 years in the future) that revolved around you explaining that while this music thing was nice, it wasn't taking her anywhere and she really ought to think about going to university.  I don't hold that against you.  Taking a position against a would-be artist who doesn't show a great amount of talent straight off is the safer bet, and of course you love your daughter.  But her picking up the guitar now, and playing like she did, the entire trajectory of her second go-round in the world is going to be very, very different.

And this highlights a critical point about learning.  As we go forward, doing things we like to do, there's a strong tendency to under-value our progress.  We compare ourselves with our peers, or worse, with people who have accomplished great things in the field.  We spend a couple of decades pitching and trying at our tasks and think at the age of 31, "Damn, I've been doing this for twenty years ... when is something going to change?  When I'm I going to stop being so incompetent?"  We don't measure ourselves by the trials we've experienced, or the obstacles we've overcome, especially because we perceive that truly successful people don't have those things.  It seems, to us, so easy for them.

But as the years go by, we do change.  We do improve.  If we keep at it, we'll be lucky enough to have one of those moments that cause us to stop and take stock, thinking, "Wow ... okay.  I couldn't have done that ten years ago."  Those moments are golden.  And if we have them consistently, it's easier to push ourselves creatively than it was before.

I was a terrible writer as a kid.  I had no talent at all.  My teachers certainly knew it; my parents too.  I was good at math, I had a good memory, I found it easy to pass my courses and didn't bother to get A's, because as I saw it, I didn't need them.  Students with a C+ average were graduated to the next grade just like those who worked four times harder to get A's.

I knew what I wanted; I wanted to make maps, I wanted to study statistics and astronomy ... and as grade 4 shaded over the next three years into grade 7, everything else faded away and was replaced with the one thing that I truly wanted to do.  I wanted to be a writer.

This, as I suggest, impressed no one.  I had no aptitude for this.  I did have a loud and precocious mouth, I had a natural talent for finding the fault or the weakness in someone's argument and I had a streaming imagination that poured out of me like a pitcher throwing 100-mile fast balls over anything but the plate.  It turned out, in the long run, that these were the right ingredients.  True enough, for some years I impressed no one with my writing ... nevertheless it poured out of me, day after day, as I wrote for myself.  I wrote down anything that interested me; I made up stories and dialogues and struggled with description; I wrote screeds about things in a diary I kept, that sometimes friends would read; I wrote poetry; and eventually, as I took more and more drama in school, I wrote scenes for us to act out.  In grade ten, I wrote a 7-minute scene (I remember the story very well) that two girls and I performed in a city-wide High School festival.  Didn't win anything, but the audience laughed at the right moments and I felt great.  In grades 11 and 12, the teachers all acknowledged me as a wannabe writer, though their expectations were low.

In university, I joined the campus paper and became something of a small time celebrity for the editorials I wrote.  One got my editor punched in the stomach by an angry woman because he wouldn't retract my statements.  After three years, on the first day of a given class, a prof would read out my name for attendance and then pause, look hard at me and say something like, "Oh, that's what you look like."  It was tons of fun.

It's been 47 years since I made the decision to be a writer.  Trying to imagine what all this experience and practice would be like stuffed into the head of a 9 y.o. boy makes my head hurt.

This is something that's escaped all the movies about time travel, and characters who live for hundreds of years, as we're on that.  It's always assumed that after one life time, surely life would just be so boring.  The elves of Middle Earth live for hundreds of years ... yet somehow they have no interest in doing nothing more than sitting around talking about why people shouldn't do stuff.  They don't invent science, they don't fiddle with technology (reforging a sword like it was is a big deal), their architecture always looks like the place was built once, and now it's fine and never, ever has to be rebuilt.  They live a thousand years, but their population doesn't overwhelm the planet, despite being able to have children.

This is not how we are.  This is how we become, as our bodies begin to ache and break down, as we find ourselves getting more and more tired after doing the shopping, as it's harder and harder to get to sleep at night and so on.  Just at the point when our wisdom crests, there's this equally growing force that compels us not to exploit that wisdom in doing anything that might take a lot of energy.  And so, we think, we'd get horribly bored if we had to live a second 75 years, or a third and a fourth.  What would we do with ourselves, we say.

I've lived almost my entire life in Calgary.  I've ventured out, lived in other places for a few weeks at a time, but somehow, with family here, and work here, and the fact that I can write anywhere, whenever the prospect of leaving has come up, it just seems to be, what's the point.

With a whole other lifespan, I could spend the next sixty years in Maine ... or England ... or Nairobi.  That alone would be a different pattern of life, with new and different pursuits, opportunities and peoples.  I could go on writing, but what other skills might I now have the time to acquire, if I did go back to being 9?  I haven't had time to be a sailor, or an artist, or to work as a humanitarian volunteer.  Having already given a lifetime to being a writer, a skill I'm never going to lose — I can see undertaking any of a hundred new skills quite easily.

"But Alexis," I hear.  "Didn't you say that time travel was just a way of telling ourselves that if we want to do something, we should just start now?  If you want to be an artist, you don't need to travel back in time.  You could start taking classes now."

Except there are still things I'm trying to do now as a writer ... that I'd have to forsake if I started putting time towards being an artist.  I have only so many hours a week that are available to me — and only so many years left on this earth.  I can't afford to squander that time on things that would take my full attention and much time to order to achieve competency.

Ah, but if I went back to being nine, think of all the time that would buy me.  I'd know I was healthy, and that I could expect to live at least until my present age, and remain in pretty good shape — barring an accident.  I'd know what was going to happen in the world, and where not to be on what dates and in what months and years.  I'd have many more years to write.  Which would mean I'd have a lot more time to squander on other things, just as I squandered years learning to write the first time around.

And I'd want to get started on things right away.  I wouldn't want to pretend to be a 9 y.o. bad writer for a few years and plausibly become a good one.  I'd want to start writing serious works right off.  There's no internet to share them.  Self-publishing is impractical.  I can write about D&D but it'll be some time before I can send articles off to Dragon magazine.  The best use to which I can put my writing would be right in the noses of all my teachers.  Those same teachers who wanted to take me under their wing and convince me to get A's the first time around.  Well, the second time around, I'd just go ahead and get the A's.  I'd convince my grade four teachers that I was obviously going to write for a living.  I'd win competitions between schools.  I'd have people tripping over themselves to clear a path for me.  It wouldn't be fair.  I'd be competing against non-time travellers.  But it would be a way to back off my parents about what I wanted to do in my spare time; it would be a way to earn money; it would be a way to find myself in another city going to a prestigious university.  If that's what I wanted the second time around.

I didn't want it the first time around ... and I'm not sorry for that.  But if I had a second time, sure.  Would be interesting to see how the other half did it.