Go back can mean a lot of things for a writer. It can mean go back to your last draft and try to improve it. It can mean go back with a family member or friend to an episode you experienced in common to get their take on those moments. It can mean go back to restaurant or museum, or sports center you like to compare experiences then with now. In this post, I note three other go-backs that I do periodically. They usually inspire some creativity.
1. Go back to your roots. For me, going back to my roots means two places: the Bronx, New York, where I grew up, and Mgarr, Malta, where my parents grew up. When I go to the Bronx, the James Monroe Housing Projects in particular, I could swear I see my ten-year-old self racing friends around the apartment buildings, playing in the softball field, and hanging on the bench with my childhood friends. When in Mgarr, as I'll be next month for the eleventh time in my life, I see the police station where my father served as a police officer. I see the fields where my mother, as the eldest of 11 children, fetched water from the well for my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Stories are behind my every step in these places.
2. Go back to something you've read. I am fortunate to have read books like John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to my grandson Delano. These are fiction pieces I read in high school or college, and as I read them a half century later to my grandson between his eighth and tenth years, I not only connected with him—always a good thing—but I get new perspectives as a senior and from Delano, 10 years younger than I was when I read them. There's a story somewhere there, right?
3. Go back to something you've written. I can go back 52 years in my journals, and I often do. I am the same person I was back then, but I am not too. My attitudes and inclinations, even my politics, have changed. I am less hopeful than I was then, but also less anxious. I was angrier then, and I am more tolerant now. Some people who know me may read this and disagree, but what matters to a writer is his own mindset. Regardless of how I feel or felt, I can tap into a reservoir of ideas from those notebooks. And I do.
