diaries & journals [retros]

meta

Hello PNP’ers, and welcome to the very first in my new retros series, an experiment in which I will revisit past stories, share inspirations, influences, choices, and – sometimes – brutally criticize myself.

The idea is that I will read through one of my stories, quote it bit by bit, write what comes to mind about the process, and desperately try to pretend anyone cares.

These will be a way to realize the ‘meta’ content of the Clancy Steadwell character in a way I hope PNP’ers will find intriguing, satisfying, and – most of all – honest.¹

The subject of our first retrospection: the short story diaries & journals.

This piece is probably not the best story to retrospect first. It’s not in first-person, which in my opinion inherently makes readers more certain that it has less basis in reality and thus have less interest in its origins. It’s also from a long time ago, and not one of my more popular posts – in fact, it was one of my first short stories on Substack.

But upon re-reading this one, I find a lot of it holds up, and I hope that this retrospective will encourage more of my now larger subscriber base to check it out. It’s also short and, therefore, relatively easy to analyze and, hopefully, for others to quickly enjoy.

Let us retrospect…

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This story is in second person, which I think is pretty rare, the only place you’re likely to see second person these days is if you’re reading some kind of interactive fiction.

I was new to Substack and was inspired by a

Dr. Kathleen Waller

post to try and write something about a common experience which would fit being shared in the second person, and for some reason (perhaps something to do with her work being inspirational) I decided to give it a try.

Now, usually, I stink at prompts. I’ve Noted about this before. Whenever I go searching for source material that needs to be pulled from a particular place, I usually get lost on the way there. I need it to simply arrive. But this prompt was general enough to let a long-lingering concept simmer to the foreground.

Reading the private contents of someone’s diary or journal or having the contents of yours read is an idea I had been kicking around for a while without much structure. I had been trying for years to give it substance, characters, a plot, to no avail.

This was the right situation to apply this idea; there isn’t a plot or characters to this piece, really, but there is a story, one that revolves around the dueling idea of read/having read a diary, the reasons for such a violation of our loved one’s privacy, and I think these ideas come full circle and tie up nicely in the end.

The first sentence firmly puts us in a familial context:

It’s always a younger sibling who says something which reveals the transgression, who has heard your parents talking about you when you’re not around.

The bit about a sibling being the revealer is based on a real-life experience I had in which my younger sister said something to my parents about how I had been bringing my Gameboy to school to play on the bus and at recess, which was a big no-no. In the story this concept goes a couple layers deeper. What I was trying to say is that the parents have said a secret something that they read in your journal or diary, and your kid sibling heard them, and has regurgitated it in front of you, so now you know they must have read it. I quite like how this came together and how I conveyed this not as explicitly as I did just now.

The next paragraph hits a stumbling block:

The mother who you were one with for nine months, the father who was there to see you enter the world.

C’mon, Clancy. Reduce that relative clause, dude. Get rid of that first ‘who’ after ‘mother.’

But I’ll forgive myself there because I think I hit on the crux of the story very nicely a couple sentences later, just enough so as not to be too obtuse:

How easy it must have been for them to give in to their fear, to attempt to know the parts of you that get vaster as you age and become your own person.

It’s scary, to see your kid growing up. Or, I presume it is. I am not a parent. I like this sentence and its placement because it sets us up to wrap around to the end where the writer must resist the temptation to read.

I wrote and published this story much, much faster than I usually write and publish a story. Give me a break – it was my first Substack story, I was excited. As a result, we get sentences like this:

You breathe, but only shallowly, because there are no words coming.

Yikes! Dual adverb. I think the conjunction was an attempt to connect to and compare with the parent’s breathing described in the preceding paragraphs, which is probably how I justified it to myself. But no, just no. I hate this sentence. It has taken all of my will not to go back into this story and change it.

You go to your room and cry. It may be the first of many times you’ll cry over this. For some it may be the last time you ever cry, or at least the last time you can remember. Maybe your parents will come in and try to apologize. Or maybe – more likely – they feign ignorance and ask what has so upset you.

This is definitely me. My parents didn’t read my diary or journal, but one time they read some stories I wrote and I heard them laughing about them in the other room where they thought I couldn’t hear. I don’t think they interpreted those stories as private, but I wasn’t ready for them to be read and I certainly wasn’t ready for them to be laughed at. I cried really hard. They didn’t know why I was upset and I don’t think they ever found out.

I don’t cry very often. Hardly ever at all, actually.

But now that I think about it, that incident was definitely the genesis of my “someone reads a journal they weren’t supposed to” idea this all came from.

When they leave, you retrieve it from that sacred hiding place and notice it’s been set back facing the wrong way, or there’s the same lingering smell of perfume your mom leaves on the dog after she’s pet it, or a page is dog-eared for them to come back to later like your dad does to paperbacks.

I like the dual allusion to dogs, one for the mom and one for the dad; leaving the scent on the dog, dog eared. But like, what parent would dog-ear their kids journal?! Hello?! That’s like leaving an “I was here” note. Must be parents who don’t give their kid much credit.

We’ve all discovered it, those of us with any modicum of an inner kingdom – the need to press ourselves through ink and charcoal into paper, to figure out who we are, to talk to ourselves as the protagonists of our own story, to make our goals untouchable scriptures for eternal reference. It’s only when we do so that the world around us begins to make sense.

It goes without saying this came straight from the heart. It’s probably not true that everyone discovers this, but writers do. That first sentence is very nice, in my opinion. Appositive phrase to the dash, then some infinitive phrases. Not every sentence can be this great.

Later in life we’ll be someplace with some leather bound paper in our hand, some Moleskin, some marbled notebook.

There should be a dash here for leather-bound. I promise not to point out all this nitpicking, typo type stuff on every retro, but I find this to be more fascinating evidence that I wrote and published this very quickly, which is – again – very unlike me.

And we must then consider what it means to know someone so completely, and whether loving someone means there are parts to them that must be forever unknowable as well.

The grand finale, returning us to the crux, completing ‘the Loop’, as I call it.

This was definitely inspired by my own feelings, from having significant others who kept journals. Unlike parenting, the temptation to read those probably had its basis in grave, youthful insecurity. I never gave in, but it always felt like a real struggle.

Ultimately, this piece is very relatable for most writers out there, which means Substack will love it. So despite there being signs of me shaking off some rust, I think you should check it out.

This was much more fun than I anticipated. Narcissistic, but fun.

See you on the next… retros.

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thanks for reading. what did I miss? read ‘diaries & journals’ and let me know if there’s anything else you’d like covered.

which piece of mine would you like to see retro’d next?

1. See my latest essay, auto-neurotic as-fiction-ation, for more explanation.