For
literally (no pun intended) as long as I can remember, I’ve loved books. What
kinds of little girls love books? I can’t speak for all of them, but when I was
growing up I thoroughly, passionately resented the stereotype that little girls
who love books are typically quiet, spectacled, mousy-looking, pastel-wearing,
extremely unathletic types who get excellent grades and are afraid of just
about everyone and everything.
Perhaps
this is because in elementary school, I was a quiet, spectacled, mousy-looking,
pastel-wearing, extremely unathletic type who got excellent grades and was
afraid of just about everyone and everything.
You
might pose a “Which came first, the chicken or the egg” type question here,
but, I would like to believe my love for books was unrelated to any of those
qualities, because while my lazy eye was corrected and I finally gave into team
sports and basic black, I continued to cultivate a passion for literature—reading
and writing it. Looking back, I can’t remember a time that I was reading books
and not writing my own. I filled a
plethora of spiral notebooks, was allowed to graduate to my father’s typewriter
when my parents feared that my hand might end up deformed, and, when my family
got a computer my freshman year of high school, I took up more memory space
than anyone else in the house. Whenever I was bored, my mind would be working
out the complexities of one plot or another. The other kids in my carpool might
only see the bleakness of a Momence morn, but I saw midnight excursions into an
enchanted forest! A creepy cave whose floor is a vortex leading to another
century! The protagonist’s heartwarming reunion with her long-lost dog!
The
rest of my family may have assumed I’d be a writer. Or they may have been
humoring me. When kids are young enough, there’s not really a whole lot of
difference. Regardless, I remember, at age ten, giving my parents what I
thought to be the opus of my career, 60 pages of typewritten and painfully
historically inaccurate Little-House-on-the-Prairie style melodrama entitled
“Wolf Moon.” They read it. They loved it. They gave copies to aunts, uncles,
even a few unfortunate coworkers, and started talking immediately about how
this could be published. Published? I
solemnly agreed that I must have created a masterpiece and would inevitably be
a published author one day.
Here’s
what made “Wolf Moon” good:
1)
I was ten.
2)
It was grammatical and neat and spelled right and had
all the components of a story, including characters, conflict, resolution, a
beginning, middle, and end.
3)
Did I mention I was ten?
Basically… “Wolf
Moon” was “cute” at best. It will also forever be remembered as the best thing
I ever wrote, because I didn’t really show my writing to anyone after that,
and, on the occasions when I did try, it had gotten too complex (a.k.a. weird)
to really be appreciated, especially now that I was too old to be a child
prodigy.
I chose to major in
English, and as soon
as I dove into college writing courses, I learned something I’d
kind of suspected all along: my writing was bad. I mean, really, really bad. I
shall forever remember the day my creative writing professor shared with us the
Seven Deadly Sins of fiction writing. I’d committed just about all of them but
the one that sticks in my mind the most was the Twist at the Ending. Stripped
of my twist-at-the-ending powers, I was absolutely useless at writing
fiction. The way my mind generally worked was to
come up with the twist at the ending first, and then work my way backwards. If
not a twist maybe a kick? A small shuffle? No. We are not writing choreography
or Twilight Zone episodes. We are
learning to write literary fiction.
Well, that shouldn’t scare me. Surely I’ve produced something literary over the years… wait… no… I definitely haven’t.
If the Seven Deadly Sins of fiction writing really do come from an
authoritative source, all my fiction will have to go through purgatory at least
twice.
And so, college
taught me that everything I’d ever written was trash. But that was
okay, because now that I knew what literary fiction was, I was armed with the
tools to assess and critique all the literature around me. While I didn’t
entirely cross the line that divides the literary snobs from the rest of the
reg’lr folk, I could tell my father why his Michael Crichton and Dan Brown
books would do little for our culture and explain to my mother why E. M.
Forster would call Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander
a romance rather than a novel. My parents hoped that I would use my English
degree for something other than offending them and finally become a writer.
“A writer? But
I’ve never written anything publishable.”
“You wrote Wolf Moon.”
“That is
definitely not publishable. Do you actually remember anything about that
story?”
“Well, there was a
family, and… um… you were ten.”
I’d cast away my
dreams of being a published author. Well, perhaps not cast away so much as
buried. No matter how disillusioned I become
by my lack of talent, by the decline of the publishing industry, by the fact
that getting a book published is a far more complicated process than my parents
had me believe, by the fear that everything that could possibly be written
already has been written, part of me still idly toys with the idea of writing a
novel someday. That part becomes alive and engaged (though keeps a somewhat
protectively detached perspective) when I read the work of my writing class
peers, or of my friends who religiously observe National Novel Writing Month.
Because I can still remember the thrill of spinning stories and breathing life
into characters, the giddy rush when you manage to plug up another plot hole
(and my Twilight Zone-esque tales had
lots of them). I think everyone should experience this high.*
*Note: It has been a couple years since I penned this endorsement for getting high. Write fiction at your own risk.
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