I used to visit my grandmother at one o'clock in the morning. When I would visit the area when my children were infants, I wouldn't have much time, so instead of sleeping the night before I left, I would go to her house and chat with her until three. She didn't mind. She said she didn't sleep. Visiting with her in those quiet hours has become one of my most precious memories. Instead of having a little tea party like I did in my last post, this time, I'm visiting you at one o'clock in the morning. I haven't decided yet if we're still wearing our makeup or if our faces are very clean. I guess it depends on how much I want to hide who I really am.
Who do you think you are? What is a writer and how did you become one?
I was a particularly talentless child. All I wanted was to play pretend. I grew up in a poverty-stricken household in rural Alberta and though I had a few toys, I preferred my imagination. When I began to read, I found the exercise to be unbearable. Why were all the books so boring? It was like the author of every single story had found the most mundane way to approach their subject matter and we were all supposed to go along with it because those were the books that had been 'chosen'. If I had to read a book about solving the mystery of who left the cookie crumbs in the sink or go babysitting within the pages of a book, I'd drop the book. That was as a preteen, but even as a tiny child bouncing on my mother's knee, I wanted to rewrite the story, fix their outdated wording, simplify their meaning, and write about something interesting. That was on the inside. On the outside, the only talent others recognized was that I had an unusually large vocabulary for a child.
I finally gave myself permission to read books intended for an adult audience when I was 13 and I was surprised by those books. The words used to make them were more interesting than the YA books I had access to, but they were awfully wordy for seemingly no reason. I wanted to rip up their paragraphs and turn them into single sentences that accomplished as much. What I learned from those books was that authors were morons. Clearly, any idiot with a pen could write. So, I started writing my first book at age thirteen.
I finished it.
I read it, recognized it was crap, forgave myself, and began a new novel with an emphasis on the parts that I particularly failed at in the last book.
I did this over and over again.
It has been almost thirty years and I still do this.
Sadly, I do not think that being an author is a miraculous thing. You make a book the same way you make anything else. You twist your yarn around your knitting needles. You fling a few words on a page and they add up like the thousands of stitches needed to construct a sweater. I don't think being a writer makes me high-minded or more worthy of praise or love than the person who knits the sweater.
When people attach academic prowess to the construction of a novel, I think they misunderstand the assignment. The goal as a novelist is to get the reader to finish reading your novel. If they drop the book, you've lost. Thus, the main goal is to be interesting and you have a collection of tools to accomplish that. One of those tools is your juicy brain, but that isn't your only tool. You have every part of your unseen self - things no one would ever imagine about you: your feelings, dreams, memories, pain, and anything else that happens inside you that the casual observer cannot see. That is the purpose of writing anything... to part the curtain of your skin and allow someone in.
How far in is a different question.
When I think of my ideal reader, I think of a woman who has just received some unpleasant news in a hospital. Whether she has to stay in the hospital because she needs treatment herself or she needs to be there to support someone close to her, it doesn't matter. She can't leave. Even if she's not receiving treatment, she's somewhere unfamiliar and the next few hours will be difficult. It's not going to help to stress over what she's just learned. There is nothing she can do, except stay in the hospital and wait for the test results. She opens a copy of one of my books and begins to read. The story takes over. It's different from what she usually reads, so it keeps her guessing and the hours fly by as her eyes race across my words. When she has finished the novel, all is well. The book has not taken an emotional toll on her. It has been surprising but like a grown-up version of a pop-up book. It has not unsettled her already unsettled mind. It has made her wonder and given her a pleasant way to pass the time when she needed it most.
Though I was not personally in the hospital, I was there for her in an out-of-body way like the ghost of a storyteller that can be revived with the cracking of a spine... or a click on a phone. Whichever you prefer.
However, this is where it gets tricky.
I have been the woman in the hospital, waiting, sick myself, trying not to think of the frozen veins the IV is giving me. I'm going to be that woman again. When it happens, it may last the rest of my life, and I think and wonder what I'll need to pack for myself when I go on the trip that I can't return from. It's not death. Death would be awesome. No, it's a kind of mind madness that can last so many years, it can turn into decades. I know exactly what I'll want. I'll want some fine reading material and only I can make it. Even when I can no longer read, I'll still want to hold the cover.
Next time I'll talk about which one of me does the living and which one of me does the writing.
With love,
Stephanie Van Orman
Novelist
P.S. I no longer think novelists are morons. I think I was reading the wrong books.
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