Ode to the Paper in My Hands

22 Wednesday Feb 2012

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I had a pen pal from New Zealand when I was in the seventh grade, but I don’t really remember a thing about him. I figured I must have just treated the whole thing like another assignment for school. It’s funny how, looking back on that, I ended up going on to build so many relationships like that anyway – something I would’ve probably completely ignored before. Now, having friends that I’ve kept in contact with from all over (the U.K., Singapore, Australia, and yes, even New Zealand), it’s quite different. And it grew different quite fast.

I started writing notes to my friends in high school, even if we saw each other regularly. We wrote to each other when we didn’t have any work in class to do, or when we were bored. That was when I also started writing letters to these other friends across the sea. It’s even stranger now, how we’re always hooked up and stuck in the clouds, how the internet has become so entirely ubiquitous – we are always attached, but only just hovering. Only just glancing and skimming through. When you pull out of the stream for a while, you really do look forward to having a message on paper in your hands. You look forward to an earnest conversation. You sit down, gather your thoughts, write them down, and send them out. And you wait. You wait for a while too, and it seems like a century in comparison to all the comments, messages, tweets, and reblogs happening all at once.

It seems almost nostalgic, the letter-writing, even though it wasn’t long ago and despite the fact that I still do it. I still keep pen pals anyway (I’m writing to my friend Thea right now, from Wisconsin) even though it really could be instantaneous now - you really could just send an email. But I think there is something to be said about taking that time and waiting. Waiting a week or two in anticipation for a response, and having a quiet, intimate conversation develop in between the spaces. Especially now, in 2012, when you can feel so entirely detached and alone, despite all the fast-speed connections going on around you. It’s hard to really listen to anyone with all the noise.

The Best Thing of All

17 Friday Feb 2012

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I have a simple question for you: What is the best thing you’ve written?

I’ve been asked this before, but I always find myself unable to respond. Was it the short story I won an award for in college? Was it the first time I ever got paid? Was it the unfinished, self-indulgent fantasy novel I let my friends read in pieces on the bus ride home? Was it the children’s story I made out of construction paper for my mom when I was just a kid? Was it that even more macabre retelling of the Cinderella story? Was it a random personal journal entry that I wrote in a fit of angst late one night and never let anyone else see?

I’m never sure, and it doesn’t help that I’m always changing. It doesn’t help that I’m always reading and writing, and most of all: going back and revising. The books I like are always changing and the way I write is always changing. My creative writing teacher in high school called me a Romantic (not lower case, not the same thing! she says), a creative writing professor in college thought I was reading too much Virginia Woolf, another professor appreciated my newly discovered minimalism. I’m like a literary chameleon, and I’m always confused how anyone can find something they call a “voice.” I seem to be unable to settle into a style or a genre. I can’t get comfortable or cozy with what I’m working with. I want to write essays, journal entries, poetry, short stories, children’s books, adult fiction novels; I want to play around and laugh, but sometimes I want to unsettle and creep around; I like to dance around in tangents and I like to cut it straight down the middle. I never feel cohesive because each new opened document sits by itself and doesn’t want to have anything to do with the others. My issue has never really been the actual writing process, but just figuring out where to get started with all the sorting and rearranging I have to do.

Am I just a curious wanderer or am I really completely lost?

Maybe this question isn’t so simple if you write a lot, but I’ll still leave it out there. Or let’s rephrase it like this: Is there any particular piece that keeps coming back to you?

Relating to Unrelatable Characters

11 Saturday Feb 2012

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Sometimes, when I’m reading book reviews online just to get a taste of what I may or may not be getting into, I manage to stumble upon something that never fails to irritate me: “Sorry, I couldn’t finish this book because I really couldn’t relate to the character at all.”

Empathy is a nice feeling, but should it always be the sole reason why we read fiction? I don’t understand why some readers always complain about this. If every character was so entirely relatable, would any be unique? Would any even have anything to say at all? With characters this completely palatable, they wouldn’t have opinions that make you reflect on or question your own, they wouldn’t behave in ways that frustrate or haunt you. They would just be parrots, echoing your own sentiments that were echoed by other parrots (who are probably a bit more colorful, anyway). It reminds me of people who can’t appreciate The Catcher in the Rye simply because they found Holden Caulfield too whiny or because they’re no longer teenagers, or people who completely avoid African American or LGBT fiction just because their own identity is outside of this realm of experience. It should always require a bit of imagination on the reader’s part, but I don’t know why anyone would complain about taking that extra leap.

I can understand why some people flinch at books that feature misogynist or racist characters, or maybe even just insufferable misanthropes. But I think, every once in a while, we need to read more books that make us bristle a little and take us outside our comfort zone simply because these people and topics do make up some part of the human experience. David Foster Wallace once said that good fiction’s primary aim should be to give the reader “imaginative access to other selves.” I also have a hypothesis that it’s really this friction (in fiction) that sustains and remains relevant to us. It’s often the literature that disturbs us that lingers the longest—it’s the books that get banned because a character is unacceptable or behaves in ways that are unsavory, for one reason or another. Ideas that are uncomfortable, taboo, question the social norms in novel ways. There are books like Lolita that can be so horrifying because you’re making a connection that you’d want to typically avoid.

What I think people really want the most out of good books is simply a way to burrow into the character’s personality and have it resonate. It might be a comfortable process, or it might not—personally, I think a few parrot feathers should be ruffled—but even if you disagree with their thoughts or behaviors, you can still feel what they’re experiencing. It beats like a heart should, and you can trace their development and have it make sense, even when it’s irrational or incongruent. I don’t think it’s really about: “Oh yeah, I definitely would have done the same thing,” but more along the lines of: “Well, I might not ever experience these things or think this way, but I can understand the origins and the evolution that came about, and my god, wasn’t it an exciting process from start to finish?”