Emily Krempholtz: I Am A Writer

I have a confession to make. My name is Emily Krempholtz, and I am an addict.

From a young age, my nana and grandpa would take us to the dollar store and tell me and my siblings we could each pick out one thing. My selection was pretty standard: I'd choose either a porcelain elephant figurine to add to my collection, or I'd buy a notebook.

My pack of pachyderms remains to this day on a shelf in my childhood bedroom, untouched, collecting dust and fond glances when I come home for the occasional weekend or day trip. But my notebook collection is out of control and still growing.

Shopping at Target with friends? Nine times out of ten I will disappear, only to be found in the office supplies section, staring longingly at the Moleskines. Writer's block while at my usual table in the Barnes and Noble cafe? I'll take a trip to the floor-to-ceiling shelf in the front corner by the registers, where the notebooks and journals are kept, to help clear my mind and gather my thoughts.

I have piles and piles of notebooks in my bedroom, waiting to be used, just begging to be filled with my thoughts, my lists, my words, my doodles. I have Italian leather bound books with thick, creamy pages, hardcover books of every color, and composition notebooks galore. I've got one notebook in which every page looks like a different kind of wall: stone, concrete, brick, wood-paneled, wallpapered... just waiting to be graffitied. And yet I can't seem to stop buying more. I buy them as rewards for getting through a difficult week or for finishing an important task, or as inspiration for a new project. There's just something about that blank book, a collection of pages completely empty but for their potential. I save them for the perfect project, for the perfect content. Sometimes they are used immediately, other times they wait for years, but eventually each of them will be filled with cramped scribblings in black ink. Of that I am positive.

At any given time I use about three or four notebooks. Currently, there's the tiny green one I keep in my purse with its matching little black pen. I keep track of my expenses and my earnings from month to month (and let me tell you, the number of times an entry titled "Barnes & Noble" appears in that little book is staggering) and I write lists. Grocery lists, lists of things to do, ideas for stories and blog posts, funny things my customers and coworkers have said to me at work, addresses, reminders, thoughts about a book or movie I'm planning on reviewing... Sometimes I just jot down a single word, expecting myself to remember its significance later on. I rarely do, but often it sparks an equally -- if not more -- fascinating train of thought.

I bought a big 11x15" hardcover sketchbook from a craft store when I was writing the first draft of my novel. I think much better on paper than on a computer screen, and I needed to sort out things like timelines, family trees, and background information. I use it to jot down little details I might forget later, for continuity purposes, and I have pages and pages devoted to character outlines, potential names, birth dates and specific ages, and historical facts. One of my best friends, an artist, helps me through writer's block sometimes by making me tell her personal details about my characters, from their deepest fears to what their teeth look like. She draws them for me, and the sketches she's given to me stay in my Big Black Book of Secrets, as it has come to be called.

Now that I am into the editing process I keep my notes for each draft in this book, writing down little things I notice here or there that should be added or moved around, or inconsistencies in plot or characterization that I should address in my next draft. I love it because the pages don't have lines. I can write in it like a notebook, doodle in it like a sketchbook, or draw up countless organizational graphs, the kind they taught you in middle school but you never actually used when writing essays.

And then there's the journals. I've kept a journal pretty consistently since about the age of eight. It relaxes me to write down the details of my life, and of course I, like many other writers, harbor the secret and vain hope that someday I might publish a memoir (after I become rich and famous, obviously). Several years ago I spent a semester studying in London, followed by a month of backpacking across Europe. I had the time of my life, but I was too poor to buy many souvenirs (or even much food, for that matter), so I rely on my photos and journal entries from that time to serve as my time machine.

From the scrawled worries about the boys I had crushes on at age ten, to the even more messily scrawled worries about my college lifestyle (including, but not limited to, the boys I had crushes on. Clearly I have done a lot of maturing), my journals piece together a patchwork story of my life. I didn't write about it all, and in fact a lot of it is eye roll inducing and repetitive, but the things I valued at the time, the things that made me tick, tell more about me than the things I could have written about, but didn't.

I've spent the past few days rereading passages, alternately reminiscing, laughing, and shaking my head in shame at the things that my past self deemed important enough to immortalize on paper. I looked at the way I used to say "bye!" or "g2g!" at the end of each entry (ah, the acronyms of early 2000's...) and the way the entire structure of my journals changed noticeably every time I read a new book I liked and wanted to emulate stylistically. I'm fascinated by my handwriting, constantly changing as I, obnoxiously self-aware even as a child, struggled to make my messy script fit some mold, to convey something about who I was even as I tried to discover what that meant.

My more recent journals have evened out a bit; the style and tone have become more natural and relaxed, and much more consistent. I've given up on my handwriting as a lost cause. Oscillating somewhere between script and print and chicken scratch, it's barely legible at times, but I've come to realize that I have finally achieved what I wanted so badly when I was younger: my handwriting is me. I can tell from the way those letters are formed my state of mind at the time when I wrote it. Was I rushed? Was I angry? Were the words very thought out? Was I writing in public or in bed or in the back seat of a moving car?

I've come to decipher those markings as more than words, as though they speak a second language in and of themselves. And thus I've discovered that not in spite, but because of the inconsistencies in the content of my entries, and my inability to record sometimes the more basic details of my life in favor of the more ridiculous and dramatic, my journals really do tell, between the lines, the story of my life. Even if no one else could comprehend it.

And that, more than anything, has kept me writing in these notebooks. I am one of the minority in my generation in that I still do not own an iPhone, but to be honest, even if I had one, I don't know that I could organize my life solely through an electronic device like my friends do. There's just something so lovely about writing by hand, about watching those smooth shapes materialize from the tip of your pen. I've even developed a begrudging fondness for the near-permanent ink stain on my left pinky finger (that bane of left-handed writers everywhere!) to the point where I've thought about getting it tattooed there as a subtle reminder to myself of who I am. The growing piles of empty notebooks in my room don't panic me, or make me feel like I should be doing more or writing more. They wait patiently for a project deemed worthy enough for them, and serve to remind me that I am doing what I was always meant to do.

My name is Emily Krempholtz, and I am not an addict.

I am a writer.

Emily Krempholtz is a graduate of Ithaca College's esteemed Roy H. Park School of Communications. She wrote her first book at the age of four and has dreamed of being a writer ever since. As a new resident in the Land of Adults, she tries to face life armed with a pen, paper, and a wicked sense of humor. She currently lives in Ithaca, NY and can usually be found holed up in the Barnes & Noble cafe working on her novel, or at the barn with the love of her life, a horse named Marea. 

As a giveaway, Emily has offered one of her many empty notebooks, "I'd be happy to part with one so long as it goes to a good home! I'd also like to give away a package of my favorite quick-drying black pens (perfect for lefties, so they don't smudge all over your fingers or the page!) "  Please leave a comment and a way to reach you, and check back on Sunday, June 30 to see if you have won!

Please share a comment below if you wish.

To find a poem by topic, click here. To find a poem by technique, click here.

Like The Poem Farm on Facebook for more poems, articles, and poemquotes!