Writer's War

Last week, I made a very unfortunate discovery.  I was walking to my car on the way out of work, and playing with my keys as I went (because how can you help but toy with a ring of keys in your hand?).  And somewhere between the restaurant and my car, I realized that there was something wrong.  I looked down at my keys, wondering why they felt so light.  Then I realized what it was, and my heart sank right down to hang out with my stomach.

Let me describe my keys to you as they should be.  There are four keys on my key ring: my house key, mailbox key, car key, and the key to a neighbor’s house, which I use when I go over to play her piano.  I have a rubber loop key ring which I use to hang them from a hook by my door, and of course the remote to lock and unlock my car.  All of these hang on a tiny caribiner, a clasp that lets me hook the keys to my purse when I’m away from home.  And there should be a pair of black, squarish flash drives on a separate ring.  But there aren’t.  Sometime in the past week or so, the flash drives were just so balanced on the caribiner that when I opened it to hook or unhook my keys from my purse, they made a bid for freedom.  I never heard them fall, and I didn’t notice they were gone for I don’t know how long.

This may not seem like such a terrible thing, and maybe it wasn’t.  But those flash drives were more than just plastic and software.  On them was stored the entire contents of my computer, the backups to all of my files.  Some of those files may be gone forever.  I haven’t had time to assess the full damage caused by the loss of the drives, but I know that I lost some things.

Such a thing a few years ago would have devastated me.  The loss of my precious work?  My ideas and my emotions, stored away, lost forever?  But I met the disappearance of my flash drives with a kind of dismayed resignation that surprised even me.  Where are the tears? I wondered.  Why am I not more upset about this?

The fact is that this has happened to me before—many times, I think I can say now.  The first time, I was fourteen or so, and I had been working on my first novel series.  I was so excited about it.  I’d made notes, drawn maps, written poems for the world I created.  I had one novel finished and another two-thirds done.  I was so proud of it.  Then our family computer crashed.  I had no back-ups, and the work was lost.  All that time, all that energy, wasted.  I cried for hours.  Since then it’s happened again: when my own laptop crashed in my sophomore year of college and just this year in January, and when a flash drive died on me and the files on it could not be saved. 

I thought I’d learned from this.  The two flash drives were updated (somewhat) regularly, and I kept them with me always.  I felt secure with them.  But this time the failure was human, not technological, and my files were gone again.

Finally now, I view this with acceptance.  It’s a sort of battle I’m fighting, struggling to preserve my stories, my thoughts and feelings.  These things are supposed to fade—it’s what they do, making room for the new.  And for writers these days, the loss of our work is a risk we always have to take.  Even paper can be soaked, torn, burned, lost.  What part of our work is visible is nothing but a record of our true calling, which is ethereal and transient.  If the record is lost, then the thoughts we wanted to preserve are long gone.

I’m still fighting the battle, of course.  I have new flash drives, new plans for greater care and security.  But I’m beginning to acknowledge that there will be casualties in the writer’s war.  My hope now is that my desire to write, my need to create, is never one of them.