Why Do I Read Fiction?

I've been thinking a lot about the reasons I (and people in general) read fiction.

A quick list:

It's fun.
To 'escape.'
To learn something about the world.
To get better at writing.
To fall asleep.

I started reading in elementary school.  Our teacher enrolled us in this program that earned us a free pizza from Pizza Hut if we read 5 books in a month.  Then she encouraged us to read 20 books in a school year and write a mini-report about each of them, earning us an award at the end-of-the-year Awards Night.  The mini-reports were a chore, but the reading and the awards and the pizza were fun.  But mostly the reading was fun.

I remember one series that same teacher introduced me to, about a street full of homes with kids the same age who all went to the same school.  Each kid had their own book, and each had a slightly differing view of the life they all lived.  One was a jock. One a quirky nerd girl. One had a parrot.  I can't remember a lot about the series, or even what it was called, but I remember feeling as if I 'knew' the kids, having seen them from the other kids' points of view, and I remember wishing I went to their school, daydreaming about being their friend, about kicking a soccer ball around the schoolyard with them.

I read the Narnia series, too. And became desperate to find another world.  Even though I knew it was impossible and was mostly just kidding every time I'd feel the back wall of a closet, or I'd jump into the middle of  the huge hedge separating the golf course behind our house from our backyards, trying to catch a talking beast before it slid into it's burrow, I still did those things.  It might be possible, I must have thought. The first time I felt my life was missing something was the day I finished the 7th book of the Narnia series, the day I realized I would never enter their world anew.

I read Life of Pi when I was a bit older, my senior year of college (the first time through).  It still ranks as one of my all-time favourites, and I often claim that it changed my life.  It did so in two ways, the first being that it was a book that showed me a world I was entirely ignorant of, that being the world of a character who did not live with my western worldview, at least not in a way I had seen before.  I am a religious person, and before reading about Pi would have scoffed at the idea of 'blending' religions, probably would have called it heretical.  The details about sloths, the practical tips for surviving at sea, taming a tiger.  The book just opened my eyes to the possibility of literature, showed me that it's not simply an escape from this life, but a tool for learning about it.  A fun tool.  A useful tool.

The second change it initiated was my interest in the writer of a story.  I had been writing since high school, in the way high-school kids often write—self-centered and worrisome about how my life is turning out, short rhyming poems that are hardly coherent even to myself—but here was the first time I was enthralled in a story and found myself thinking about what the author was actually doing.  That is to say: The first time I started thinking critically about a text was when I realized Yann Martel was telling two stories at once.  It sort of removed the '4th wall,' I guess, and I started to think maybe I should start taking this writing stuff seriously; I wanted to write like Martel.  And so I started actually writing, but I started reading in a new way, in a diligent way, trying to take tid-bits of strategy, or whatever, from other established writers.  And of course when I started reading about writing, this is the tip every writer gives to beginning writers: Read.

So I read for these reasons.  These and the fact it helps me to wind down at the end of the day, to forget, for a moment, the stresses of the day, so I can slip into sleep.

But I think the real reason I read, and the actual reason anyone reads is more than these things.
I think the reason we read is to convince ourselves we are not alone.  And I think reading is thoroughly convincing in doing so in a number of ways.

Stephen King says reading is the only true form of telepathy, which sounds weird and quirky and exactly what he would say, but I think I agree with him.  Right now, for instance, I'm writing my thoughts, you're reading them, and they are in your brain.  I have placed my thoughts in your brain without talking to you or even seeing you or possibly even meeting you or knowing who you are.  There you go.  In this way, we can see that we are not alone, for we are aware of someone else's words and thoughts in our minds.

Many apologists for the study of the Humanities and specifically literature, advocate that reading teaches empathy.  And in my mind, reading is the single most important tool we have for learning and practicing empathy.  When we read, we are forced to experience the world through the mindset and worldview of someone other than ourselves.  When a child is immersed in the world of Harry Potter, say, s/he is also immersed in the mind of Harry Potter.  They are viewing the world through his perspective and are thinking as he would think.  In other words, they are thinking from another person's perspective, feeling anger when Harry is angry, feeling fear, joy, nervousness, whatever.  They are not only thinking from another's perspective, but feeling from another's perspective, which is a pretty good definition of empathy if you ask me.  So not only does it make you aware of another's thoughts mixed in with our own—as in my first point—but it also teaches one how to think like another person.

If you're lucky you have a best friend.  This friend is usually considered 'the best' because you
feel as if you can share anything with them, all of your thoughts and desires, and they will care about these things.  Still, you have to open up and share them.  If you are even more lucky, you have been in love, and have had someone love you.  In this case, you might feel as if your loved one knows you so well, they know what you are thinking in any given situation.  This is often the case, as it is with my wife and me.  And yet, it is never completely the case.  No matter how well my wife knows me and is abel to guess what I am thinking, she is never completely aware of my thoughts, nor I of hers.  When I'm at work or school and she's at home or work or with the kids or wherever, we are each thinking all the time, without ceasing.  It is impossible to literally share these thoughts telepathically or otherwise all the time.  Which is to say: At an existential level, we are all alone.  This may sound melodramatic, but it must be true.  It is the reason, I believe, we, as humans, seek out meaningful relationships and are not fulfilled without them.  We recognize our aloneness and wish to remedy it through relationships.

But I think we also remedy it through reading fiction.  The reason people feel like they know Harry Potter, or any other fictional character, is because they've spent time thinking along with them. While it is hardly true that we think every thought Harry does throughout his time at Hogwarts, or throughout the whole long story, we are exposed to some of his thoughts as he thinks them, and therefore are thinking them together with him.  We are not alone as we read.

So all this to say: I believe reading fiction is more important than simply being a means of entertainment, an escape from stress, or a way to put yourself to sleep.  It teaches you about the world you live in in a way that other forms of entertainment, or even other art forms, cannot.

But more than that, it is perhaps one of the only tangible things that is able to convince you that you are not alone, and teaches you how to think like other people. It first shows you the need for empathy, then shows you how to empathize.

In other words, reading fiction is important. We should all read more of it. 

Writing Commandment Number Six: Slow This Story Down

6. Slow This Story Down

I have a half-finished novel stored away in my desk drawer.  I was writing away, imagining all the awards I was going to win for my outstanding debut, when I heard an interview with Neil Gaiman in which he said he had an idea for a book twenty-five years ago, or something like that, but he only recently felt like he was a good enough writer to start writing it.  This concept was startling.  If you have the idea, shouldn't you be able to write it down?  Well, I guess not.  Who's going to argue with Mr Gaiman?  Not me.

Eventually, I slowed down on the novel, started getting frustrated, petered out completely and felt stuck, up against the dreaded wall.  I re-read it, and felt embarrassed at my previous feeling of gusto, and decided the novel was garbage.  I couldn't really tell what was wrong with it, but knew that it was lacking something.  My mentor at the time, Joseph Kertes, said that he liked the writing, that I had a good starting point (A), but felt as if I was rushing off to the end (Z), and was skipping B or F or W, and just landing on a few points here and there, not allowing time to get into the characters' heads.

Obviously, you're not going to write down every minute from when a story begins to when it ends.  No one wants to read what you're characters are thinking about while they're sitting on the can.  But you can't be so into the plot points that they feel like a series of photos, recounting your favorite bits of a family vacation.  Every one has flipped through the albums (tangible or digital) and had someone saying, "Oh this was the zoo. It was so great.  And this was the aquarium. You shoulda seen the sharks. This was the best food truck I've ever eaten at."

There's no story there.

So I decided to wait until I was a better writer to start my novel over.  I've been working on short stories since then (It's actually turned into a collection of linked stories that I'm nearly finished and really excited about).  My goal in the stories is to slow down, to really figure out what is going through my characters' minds as they stroll through their respective stories.  Sometimes I have a great ending in mind, and I find myself rushing off to it.  But I've learned.  No.  I'm learning that an ending will never be great, unless I've taken the proper time to get there.  You can't rush it.  You can't load the story with unnecessary details—that's worse than rushing through—but you have to have a logical sequence of events for an ending to feel inevitable, which—I believe—ought to be the goal.

This whole thing has made me think about Time in general.  It's terrifying to think that right now, this moment, is only ever happening this one time, and then it's gone.  You know all the mambo jumbo: Seize the day.  Time is Money.  You only live once.  But seriously, how many times have I sat in front of the TV for bloody 5 hours at a time, and then slumped of to bed having wasted my entire evening.

It's made me value my own time as much as my characters'.

It's also made me think about what we DO do with our time.  I have a wife, two kids. I spend time with them.  I go to school full time.  I work part time.  I read, watch TV.  I wake up early to write.  But there's also time in between all of these things, when I'm driving, or walking, or laying on the couch.  There isn't a minute of any day that I'm not doing something.  If I'm doing nothing, I'm thinking (therefore I am).

I seem to think my thoughts are interesting.  Why would I keep thinking them if I didn't?

Applying this to a character makes me think, "Why shouldn't we be interested in their thoughts from on the can?"  I am not saying every thought needs to be voiced.  I am saying there shouldn't be a time in a character's story in which the writer shouldn't be interested in their thoughts.

I've been married to my wife for almost seven years, been dating or interested in her for ten.  I have a pretty good idea of what she's thinking when I'm with her.  She has a flawless idea of what I'm thinking.  But every now and then she says, "I've been thinking about this..." and it blows my mind because I never would have thought she'd think about that.  This leads me to think about the fact that at every second of every day, she's been thinking about something.  There's no way I'll ever know all of her thoughts.

Think about the old guy who spills his coffee at the food court.  Or the six year old screaming at his mom.  Or the grumpy lady ringing your groceries through.  Whoever.  I tend to think of them of props, just there as fill-ins in the story of my life.  I couldn't live my life without them, but apart from the few minutes of interaction I have with them, they don't exist.  But if you think about it,  every single person you will ever see has lived their lives, one day at a time, one moment, one thought, up to the time in which you have seen them.  There is an entire person inside of them, as interesting—probably more interesting—than you are.  They've gotta be.  They keep thinking their thoughts.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a good writer will slow down, take the time to figure out what a character is thinking that takes them from A to Z, and take even more time to make those thoughts clear.  It may not mean every thought is out there on the page, but that the writer has been calculated enough that the reader is able to infer these thoughts.  In a writer's mind it might be totally logical for a character to do this or that to get to the end of a story, but we have to take the time to allow the reader to follow the character's journey there. 

This means, in my mind, that I can't rely on plot.  A worthwhile story, even if it's a mind altering thriller, must slow down, take the time to get into a character's inner self, and illustrate that to the reader.

Otherwise, the story will just be a story.  It's the characters that make it memorable.

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

Writing Commandment Number Five: Write About Weirdos

5. Write about Weirdos


I follow Justin Bieber on Twitter.  I started because I watched Never Say Never and the kid actually impressed me, and I feel like I'm part of something bigger than myself when I see that there are nearly 20 million people following him.  But I continue following, not because I like his music—not at all—and not because he has anything spectacular to say—He mostly just advertises his upcoming work (which is what Twitter is all about, I suppose). I continue following mostly because he retweets hundreds of his followers' tweets every week.  


I find these tweets implausibly interesting.  They are incredible in their ability to be unoriginal.  I sit and read them and I think to myself how these tweets could have all—every single one of them—been written by the same person.  


"I love you, Justin. I've been a fan since the start. Will you marry me? I love your new album. You're the best musician ever. Retweet if you love your fans, Justin!! It's my birthday!!! RT Please? You'll make my life if you retweet!!!" 


Hundreds. Every week. I bet he gets multiple tweets, literal identical tweets from different people.  


What is more interesting, is the phenomenon that millions of these fans feel like they discovered Justin Bieber personally.  You know the story: Biebs was basically discovered because he posted Youtube videos of himself singing and playing music.  Millions of people were following him and falling in love with him before he sold a single record.  


And each of these millions feels irrepressibly connected to him.  They have convinced themselves that they have some sort of deep personal connection to him.  Because they themselves discovered him.


Individually, they are part of the millions that helped him get discovered.


Good fictional characters come from the margins of society.  This is because no one wants to read about someone who is completely normal.  But when you actually think about it, no body feels as if they are "completely normal."  Take a step back and look at the legions of Beliebers.  It's easy to think they are a mindless mob of fans, screaming inaudible sweet-nothins and fainting and waving their home-made signs and grabbing their smart phones to snap a blurry photo or to tweet, I love you J-Boss...RT!!!!!!  


But zoom in a little.  You'll find millions of individuals who have their own special reason for loving him. And I'll wager they each believe their reason to be superior to the next person's.  


Good fictional characters come from the margins of society because when you zoom in, when you really get into a person,  get to know them, you inevitably have to realize that there isn't a single person in this universe who fits neatly into any single stereotype. 


Why should your characters?


You can have all the twists and turns of an incredible plot.  You can have explosions and car chases, or the most romantic love story, or the strangest world ever imagined, the greatest twist ending ever conceived, but if your characters fit neatly into any sort of stereotype, they will be boring. Flat out boring.  And I—for one—would stop reading the story.  I even think one ought to stop reading it; there are too many good books, with great characters, to waste your time reading boring ones. 


Of course, you need a good story, but a good story doesn't come from the crazy events that happen to a character, but from the ways in which your character reacts to them.


You need to figure out what makes them react the way only they would react, what makes them different than everyone else, what makes them an individual, what makes them weird.


What makes a character stick out, what makes a character effective, is pointing to the things that make it weird. These are the things that make a character real.


So write about weirdos. Do it.  And don't be ashamed of it.


At least that's what a young writer might do...

Writing Commandment Number Four: Be Purposeful

4. Be Purposeful

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the responsibility of a writer, if there is such a thing.

I wrote an earlier post in which I claim (with the help of Stephen King & others) that writing is a form of telepathy. Writing is a solitary act, yet it obviously invites others to participate after the act is completed.  My words and ideas, as I sit in my writing burrow (which is actually a little known place called Starbucks), are my own, yet they become yours as you read them.

This is a humbling concept.  To think of my words flooding another's mind is invigorating, surely, but also intimidating.  As a writer, I offer these words on the page, and the reader is free to converse with it, even disagree with it, but once I send it off, I am no longer active in the debate.  The writer must say what it needs to say or be left vulnerable to the reader, who, presumably, will have something to say about it.  It is up to me, the writer, to answer the questions of the reader, within the writing, before the reader has asked them, before they've even thought them.

How is one to do this?

You must know what is you mean to say, and say it.

That is not to say you have outlined the entire story and are closed to anything the text has to say about itself.  As any writer will tell you—if they are serious with themselves—The text, the story, is its own entity. It does have its own agenda, it leads you places, it skips parts and cuts characters and offers resolutions you may never have discovered if you tried to write the entire thing in your mind before setting it on paper.

This is what a first draft is for. Set down the story.  Follow it, move with it, figure out what it wants, but set it down.  Once you have done this you can, you must, figure out what it wants to say, and say it.
Revise it until it is clear.  Joyce Carol Oates says, "For the serious writer, writing is revision. For nothing is ever as good as it could have been" (In fact, she takes this Be purposeful commandment so far as to say, "The first sentence cannot be written until the last has been written").

The point is, there is no good writing that 'just happens,' inspired or otherwise.  You can't sit down with a character or a scenario and just write and write and write until you find something that resembles an ending.  Of course you could, but you should never leave it at that.

You need to ask what the story is about, what is it saying, what is it doing, who is it speaking to, and then revise, revise, revise.

At the same time, though, if I am causing these words, these ideas, to flood into your brain and potentially cause you to change the way you look at the world, the purpose of my story better be something of worth.

It's often said (and I won't deny the claim) that writing is therapeutic.  But if its only purpose is to help its author work through some unresolved issues, it will not be as powerful as it could be.  Writing needs to move out of the author's own sphere of thinking and into the world it has been created in.

But what is this worthwhile something? 

It's almost definitely going to be different for every writer writing.  And, for that matter, every reader reading.

Stephen King says (and I promise I'll stop talking about him, sometime): 'The job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story's web of lies..." Of course fiction isn't true, but it ought to offer a truth about the human experience.

The novels and stories that have most affected me, that have literally changed the way I view the world—Leo Tolstoy's, Anna Kerenina. Philip Roth's, American Pastoral. Lloyd Jones's, Mr. Pip. Carol Shields's, Stone Diaries. Emma Donoghue's, Room. Cormac McCarthy's, The Road. Don Delillo's, Falling Man. Lorrie Moore's, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling In Peed Onk." Joyce Carol Oates's, "The Girl With the Blackened Eye. Any of Alice Munro's stories. And I'm sure there are others—these stories have offered a true depiction of the world we live in.

None of them are identical, obviously.  But somehow they have managed to get outside of themselves and into the world, showing the reader something significant about this thing we call, Life.

As I write this, I have a picture of myself at seventy, eighty maybe, playing sudoko or working on a crossword puzzle, looking up from the newspaper (or some digital version), saying, "Who said that? Oh that wasn't me. That was some pretentious twenty-something-year-old who didn't have a clue, as if he had a sniff what Real Life was back then."

But for now—before I've even published a single work (don't tell anybody), before anyone would have any reason to listen to me—I'm willing to say that if you want to be taken seriously as a writer, as an artist, you must Be Purposeful.  You must figure out what your story needs to say, and say it in a way that is worthwhile to the reader, in a way that causes the reader to be forced into a confrontation with the true human experience, pleasant or otherwise.

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

Writing Commandment Number Three: Read

3. Read

Yeah, yeah, these commandments are hardly revolutionary.  Any writer who knows anything writing will likely say Read and Write if you want to get better at the craft.

"Every good writer I know or have known began with an insatiable appetite for books." - Richard Bausch

"You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading." - Margaret Atwood

"Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it." - William Faulkner

"Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors." - Francine Prose

It goes on and on.  Writers have an obsessive compulsion to read.  If ever I'm feeling the dreaded writer's block (which I don't exactly believe in, but that's another blog entirely) threatening to fall on top of me, I pick out a book and read.  Whenever I'm stressed out, or tired, or bored, I find ten or twenty minutes here or there, and read.  I think this is true of any serious writer. If you don't have time to read, or feel you could go without it, you should snap your pen in half and toss your notebooks in the recycling bin. No one will have time for your writing, if you don't have time for reading.

There's no better way to learn everything from plot structure and character development to how to use a comma, or a stupid em dash, than by reading the masters that have come before us.

But rather than give my version of all the previous commands to read, I'm simply going to give a few examples of books I think a young writer (or anyone, for that matter) should read.

a).  Read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis


This, I'll admit, is totally a nostalgic choice.  I can say with a fair amount of certainty that these books are what turned me into a real reader.  I read books before this, I know I did. But I was taken up in these books, and I entered a mild form of depression as I started the seventh book, and almost lost my mind once it was finished.  There was something inside of me that started to burn while I read the series—the love of reading a good story, and I ran out to buy The Hobbit as soon as I finished.  I have never not been in the middle of a book since reading it.

b). Read Life of Pi by Yann Martel


From C.S. Lewis, I went to J.R.R. Tolkien to Madeleine L'Engle to Philip Pullman to George McDonald to J.K. Rowling to Stephen R. Lawhead to T.H. White to whoever else.  Basically, if it was a magical world, I wanted to spend time inside of it.  My friend told me about this book that was winning awards about a boy who gets stuck on a boat with a tiger named Richard. And I somehow got the picture that they talked to each other and made friends or whatever.  I thought it was magic. Maybe Richard was the new Aslan.  Maybe the boat could fly. I don't know.  But I ordered it from Amazon, and got to reading it as soon as it arrived.  I read it straight through, and I can honestly say it changed my life.

 It changed my life in two ways:

          1) It was the first 'realist' novel I had read outside of school, and began my shift from fantastic literature to realist literature.  Actually, I hardly ever read anything that's not realist anymore.  That's not to say I don't appreciate fantasy. or whatever.  I have just grown to love realist fiction. And I can say beyond doubt that Martel helped me realize that love.

          2) It was the first time I payed attention to what the writer was doing, rather than just immersing myself in the story.  I was blown away by the book.  I won't ruin the story (cause you're going to go flying to read it, right?), but I'll say that coming to the end, I realized the whole story, up to that point, may be entirely different than what I thought it was.  He was able to tell two separate stories at one time, which were the same story. or something. Read the book. It's awesome.  It started me thinking about the ways writers crafter their stories, and really kickstarted the desire to write in my brain, or gave it a boost.

c). Read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 


It's a speculative fiction of a dystopian future, something Atwood has basically mastered.  It is so outrageous, yet utterly believable as something that could happen in this world we live in.  Read it, then start recycling.

I haven't read anything of hers that I didn't like, but this was my favorite (so far).

d). Read A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby


I found this book on the discount shelf at Chapters.  It looked cool, so I bought it.  It's about four characters that meet on the same roof, each with their own plan of jumping off.  Sounds morbid, but it's a great read.  It was my first encounter with alternating points of view in the same book, and Hornby crushes it.  Each character is unique and believable and interesting.  Truthfully, almost anything I've read from Hornby has been great. He wrote High Fidelity & About a Boy & Fever Pitch & An Education & others. For a fun read that still makes you consider the world beyond yourself, read Hornby.

e). Read Alice Munro

Seriously.  If you want to see a master story teller in action. Read Alice Munro.  Every single story I've read by her has affected the way I think about writing in some way.  She's a complete genius.

f).  Read On Writing by Stephen King


I think I've referenced this book in every single blog post I've written.  The book changed my writing life in so many ways.  Truthfully, I haven't read any of his other work.  I've always been scared of it, but he friggen knows how to produce, and he has some really simple, but profound things to say about the writing process.  I think about the things he says in this book every time I sit down to write.

I could go on like this for a long time:

Joyce Carol Oates. Tim O'Brien. Cormac McCarthy. Katherine Mansfield. Julian Barnes. Emma Do\noghue. Neil Gaiman. Carol Shields. Lloyd Jones. Anne Tyler. Umberto Eco. Flannery O'Connor. David Mitchel. Milan Kundera.  Mohsin Hamid. Aravind Adiga. Barbara Kingsolver. David Shields.

Ok. I'll stop.  It is one of the most beautiful things about literature that one book, leads to another, to another, to another, ad infinitum.

If you want to grow as a writer, read books. It's the only way to learn.

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

Any books you would add to a Must Read List?

Writing Commandment Number Two: Write!

*After reading Richard Bausch's Letter To a Young Writer, which consists of ten tips for writing, I have assigned myself the task of writing my own letter to a young writer in the form of blog posts in which I will offer my Ten Commandments of Writing (as I see them now, as a young writer myself).*



2. Write


You must write. The minute, the second, inspiration hits, you need to drop what you're doing—eating, showering, sitting on the can, driving, homework, whatever—get a pen and paper, and write.  The minute the fairy dust is sprinkled upon your brain, you must run, as if the world of literature depended on it, to write what these beautiful pixies have to say.  Otherwise, you'll never write anything.

Just kidding. Forget inspiration.  I used to 'get inspired' at the movies, or while listening to music, or while reading a good book.  So I'd do what I thought I'd supposed to do. I'd write in my little notebook.  It would undoubtedly just be a reproduction of what had given me this 'inspiration,' and was most certainly not anything worth sharing with anybody.  What I thought was inspiration was really just an emotional reaction to the piece I was interacting with.  This is a good thing, but it is not at all what a writer needs to 'wait for' in order to get writing.

I am not denying the occurrence of true inspiration.  Ask Plato. He'll tell you that artists are possessed when they are creating real works of art. Ask Margaret Atwood. She'll tell you the Margaret Atwood, in the act of creating—sitting at her desk, scratching it out on paper or typing it up, actually writing—is not the Margaret Atwood who does interviews or readings, or who sips her tea.  Ask almost any artist. They'll likely tell you that when their best work is produced it is out of some kind of supernatural or unexplainable sort of inspiration. The muse, or whatever.

What I'm saying is that if you wait for this inspiration to hit, you may produce a nice little sonnet here or there, you might sketch out a beautiful vignette sometime or other, but you will never produce as much as you'd like to, and you'll most likely give up on this writing dream.

If you want to be a writer, you must write.  You've gotta put aside time to write. I've heard it said that if you are a true writer, you'll automatically make time for your writing.  This may be the case; I can feel my whole body starting to itch—beginning in my fingers and earlobes—once a certain amount of time has passed without my being able to write. I will put aside anything in these moments in order to write. I get what they mean. Still, it takes practice.  What if you're 'itching' to write, but haven't been inspired.  This is when I would get frustrated. I'd be anxious to write, but couldn't get my brain to move its thoughts from my head onto the page.

Write anyway.

If you have no idea what you are going to write, sit down and put your pen on the paper, and write words, or sentences. Write whatever pops into your head.

Stephen King says:

          Don't wait for the muse.... This isn't the Ouija board or the spirit-world we're talking about here,  
          but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks.  Your job is to make sure the
          muse knows where you're going to be every day from nine 'til noon or seven 'til three.  If he does
          know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his
          magic.  - On Writing


You may not like his writing, but he is one of the most prolific contemporary writers of our time. And he knows a thing or two about the writing process (One of my commandments should probably be 'Read On Writing.' It'll change your writing life. It did mine for sure).  After reading this, I determined that at the Very least, I would go writing once a week.  King suggests every day, but with school, two kids, a job, and a wife to schmooze, it's not easy to make time daily.

Still, that once a week is a lot more than I would have if I simply waited for the Muse to inspire me.

If you want to get anywhere with your writing, if you want to improve your writing, you must write, whether the pixie dust is in the air or you feel like you're pushing your pen through molasses with each new word.

It's very simple: Sit down and write.

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

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...