Artist Statement:
S.I. Dunbar is an essayist, young adult novelist, and the author of THE UNREACHABLE (Black Rose Writing™ ). After her estranged father’s unexpected death in 2010 she moved to Austin, Texas and has yet to think of a better place to be. She is a tea drinker, a permaculture enthusiast, and a shadow puppeteer. In the few hours she is not writing, S.I. enjoys reading, throwing clay, and listing two serious things before one joke.
"Kill your darlings."
If you're a writer, chances are you've heard it before. If you're like me, you've heard it from your every idol. And if you're like me, you've largely ignored it.
All of my stories start on paper. I don't think well in the company of glowing screens. I've become accustomed to working with a pen between my fingers and a notebook in my lap. I love my notebooks, all of which are very lovable, despite their tattered covers and unraveling spines. I love them that way—gently used, worse for wear, homey—because I made them that way.
They started out stiff and pristine with straight, resistant lines. I broke them in. Writing notebooks are for slashing and scratching at. I needed notebooks I could get a little rough with at night without having to apologize in the morning. I need something I could show every side of myself. They are the perfect receptacle for my messy thoughts. Notebooks work for me. They're part of my method: write without filter, only in pen, and save e v e r y t h i n g.
Everything. Even the embarrassing stuff. Even the stuff I don't know what to do with. Even the plot points that don't fit in my current story and the quotes that, upon review, I'm almost sure my character would never say. I write it all and I keep it all.
My notebooks are the cutting room floor. Everything goes down, but not all of it can stay there. Some words get removed. Lots of words, actually. A line or two of every page will be missing.
Words get removed. They don't get thrown away. Each scrap that is sectioned out gets dated and filed in a shoebox. These words are an investment. I can bank on them later, to patch the rough spots in other stories. A quote that didn't fit one character will hang off another like a well tailored suit.
If I thought it and I meant it, I keep it. My role is to write truthfully and genuinely. The world's role is to receive my writing (positively or negatively). I don't like to blur those lines. I write what I want. Nothing that comes out of my head through my hands finds its way to the trash.
Thoughts are fleeting and tough to trace. A random assemblage of variables go into forming them. There's your mood, which can depend on any number of factors like whether it rained or you had time to eat breakfast or whether Janice strolled by your desk to tell that SAME DAMN JOKE and roped you into a fake laugh again. Then there's the idea the thought sprung from, which can come from anywhere and everywhere—an article you read or an anecdote your boss told or a crude drawing on the door of a bathroom stall. Thoughts also link up with other thoughts to make a chain that will drag you to your ultimate conclusion. One thought can be the amalgamation of twenty others, and that one thought might only come to you once before exiting your conscious mind forever.
A thought can be significant long before we understand why. That's why I believe thoughts should be vaulted and saved as often as possible, for as long as possible. Thoughts are keys that unlock bits of our past, bits of realizations we've come to, epiphanies we've had, and truths we've skimmed off the top of unpleasant experiences. They're worth examining and they're worth keeping, hopefully until the day we're old enough to appreciate that they happened at all.
I don't kill my darlings. I'm not so merciful as that. I kidnap, hogtie, and hold my darlings for ransom. I keep them stowed away until they beg for release. My mind has a vice grip. My mind is an entrance without an exit. There is no escape. Once you are mine, you are mine always.
Or, you know, until I run out of room in my shoebox.
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