Letter To a Young Writer

I read Letter to a Young Writer, by Richard Bausch, because it was part of the required reading for a creative writing class I was taking.  I'm almost positive I would never have read the thing if I hadn't have taken the class—mostly because I still have never heard his name anywhere else.  In it, he gives his ten commandments of writing, "of what [he has] been able to learn from reading or being around writers who are better than [he]."  They are well worth taking a look at, especially number four: Train yourself to be able to work anywhere (in my opinion).

I'm not gonna write about Bausch, though.  

After we read the piece, our professor said he thought about making one of our assignments, Write a Letter to Yourself, a Young Writer. He didn't, but he asked us if we thought that would be a good idea.

I think that would be a good idea.

I am twenty-eight. I mentioned in an earlier post how I cheated on a poetry contest in 10th grade, and how that eventually led to my desire to write.  I have been taking this desire seriously for about the last three years.  I know I'm not the youngest of writers, but I'm unpublished and gung-ho and still believe I'll write some sort of world-altering work of art, someday.  

I'm not gonna write a letter.  

I'm gonna write a series of blog posts, to myself (and I guess to whoever wants to read them), entitled The Ten Commandments of Writing for a Young Writer.  I'm not sure I have ten commandments yet.  But I have at least a couple. And I'm just going to add the rest to the blog as they come to me.  

So that means they won't be in any sort of hierarchal order.  I'm sure I'll think of better rules as I read or hang around writers who are better than I.  But here goes with the first.

1. Think of your characters as if they are real people.

Yeah, yeah, of course you should think of them as real.  If you want them to be believable, they have to seem real, or whatever.  But this is what I mean: Other people think about themselves as much as you think about yourself; Other people have been thinking about themselves since the minute they were capable of thinking.  

What does this mean for your characters?  

I have three sisters, one older, two younger.  We have been pretty close for a long time.  We spent hours playing together, fighting each other, adventuring in the forest (which was really a clump of trees on the outskirts of a golf course), playing barbies or G.I. Joes or whatever.  I hung out with them, especially my younger sisters, throughout high school and afterward. One of them is married to the guy who stood with me as my best-man at my wedding. We can spend hours reminiscing about summer holidays or Christmas holidays or piano lessons or whatever.  My youngest makes me laugh harder than anybody (with the exception of my wife, maybe) in the world.

I know them.

But not long ago, my youngest sister, Katie, told me of the games she used to play with Joni, our other sister, games I had no idea they ever played (and no idea how they even dreamt them up).  She told me she had this thing where she could never fall asleep unless she knew someone in the same room as her was awake (they shared a room).  She'd, every now and then, whisper Joni's name, and Joni would whisper back, "Awake." If Joni didn't whisper back, Katie would wake her up. Then she could fall asleep, knowing someone else was awake to watch over her.

This is not overly strange, I don't think.  But it is something I never knew about them.

It sort of concretized a concept I've been trying to wrap my head around for a while. That is basically that every person walks around living their life minute-to-minute, second-to-second, the same as I do.  I seem to have this notion in my head that when I leave a room, the people left in it stop living.  They just disappear into some sort of dark abyss until I come back to join them so they can keep going.  Of course, I know this isn't true. I know they're there; I wonder what my wife is doing while I'm at work, I think about the fun my son is having at his grandma's when she's looking after him, I miss Joni as she lives in the next province over, but it's almost impossible for me to think in a concrete way about how they all are living, exactly as I am, with unending thoughts about whatever they want to think about, which is—if they're anything like I am—usually themselves.

I think this way about my characters too.  I tell the story I want to tell.  It starts with them in their living room, or at the piano, or in their car, but I almost never think about what they were doing before the first sentence.  I try to think of "who they are." I try to "become the character"or whatever, to get inside of them, but how can I do this if I don't even know what they were doing before I introduce them to people?  Or after I've finished telling people about them?   

What I'm trying to say is this: 

Your characters should think about themselves as much as you think about yourself. 

Your character ought to have lived an entire life before they enter your story.  They ought to keep on living after it's done.  The more of that life you can imagine—weather you put in the story or not—the stronger your characters will be.  

At least that's what one young writer might think...