This is the final assignment.
You've written your life for one month. What have you learned? What have you learned about writing? What have you learned about yourself? Have you developed any new talents? How have you improve?
Write about the experiences you've had writing your life.
assignment 30
When I started this project one month ago, I didn't know where it would go. I had ideas for the first few assignments, but resolved to write one assignment every day throughout the month and then to write my own story for each assignment on the next day.
I'm proud to say that I've stuck with that. I haven't missed a day, though I did almost forget on two days and had to stay up late to meet my goals. I've hit every word limit and attacked every subject as well as I could. It helped that I am the one who set the subjects.
Partway through the first week, I realized that I'd unconsciously started grouping my ideas into weekly themes. They're subtle, but there are connections in each set of seven assignments. That made only 28, but it was easy to choose 29 and 30. The themes made it easier in some ways to start a week of assignments, because each theme suggested two or three ideas, but it also was more difficult to finish a week when I'd exhausted the easy topics and had moved on to thinking about the next theme.
This meant that sometimes I chose odd topics at the end of a week — even things I'd never considered writing about before. The best example of this is the assignment about fear. I had brought up that subject in brief with only one or two people ever and had to decide if I really could write about it. If I made it the assignment, I would have to do so.
My normal weekday schedule was to work until 4 pm, go for a walk or lift weights for half an hour, and then to write the day's assignment and my version of the previous day's assignment. This worked out really well. I'd usually spend between 30 and 45 minutes writing and would have the rest of the evening to enjoy the feeling of having done something useful. Weekends were more difficult, particularly if I had plans on Saturday.
Looking at the subjects I wrote about, it's interesting how few childhood memories I have are strong enough to sustain a thousand words worth of introspection. I have a lot of impressions and visual memories, but they're mostly pictures of events, very difficult to describe in more than a couple of paragraphs.
College came up much more often. Someone asked if this meant that I think that I haven't done anything very interesting since college. I think instead that college was a time of such dramatic changes that it has some of my most distinct memories. In all of the writing I've done about those times, I've realized how much I have changed in the past ten years. I would make some very different choices if I could do things over again knowing what I know now.
Some assignments were on topics I'd already written about. For example, I'd written several essays about various facets of my Worst Day Ever, but never from that perspective. If I hadn't done that, that entire subject would have filled two or three assignments. I chose instead to look to other subjects.
It felt weird not editing my work as I went along. Besides fixing a few typos here and there and maybe adjusting a sentence or two as I looked at previews I didn't change anything. If I went back now to edit, I don't know how much I would change. It was nice to let ideas flow out of my head onto the screen. I didn't plan much in advance, though I always had a day to think about a topic before I started writing. Many of the essays show that, with occasional awkward flows between separate ideas. This only affects those essays that have multiple ideas — those topics big enough to cover the word limit by themselves had a natural arrangement.
It also feels weird to talk so much about myself. Looking at all of the sentences that use the word "I" or me feels self-indulgent, but how do you write autobiographically without talking about yourself?
In the real world, a few friends have told me that they think that all of this introspection has made me a more open person. That may be true. It's taken a lot of self-appraisal even only to come up with topics to write. Oddly, it doesn't feel risky or dangerous to talk so much about myself here. Partly that's because I think I'm a much stronger writer than I am a speaker. I do pretty well in conversations, but with writing I can put down my thoughts almost as clearly as I think them. This is where my greatest talents lie.
It's nice to reveal more of my thoughts, goals, and history in this form. The few people who've read this have told me that they understand me better now, reading my version of significant events in my life. When I talk to people, I always have the sense that I've explained something before even if I've only ever told it to one other person somewhere. It's weird, but it feels like I'm repeating myself. Maybe I don't have a good memory for conversations.
Thinking about a childhood memory I remembered strongly enough to fill the word limit was very difficult. As I said before, I have a lot of visual impressions of events but no strong memory of actual events to put things together. I could probably write twenty five paragraphs about twenty five different events without being able to put them in any chronological order or write any more than just the picture in my head.
Will I keep writing? I like the idea of writing something every day. It's really difficult to come up with autobiographical topics, though. Keeping a journal might be useful, but I've tried that before and didn't have a lot to say. It's a lot easier to sum up the high points of a month or year in a thousand words than to find a hundred interesting words for an average day.
I do have another idea, though, one that should prove more sustainable. That, though, is a story for another time.