You Are What You Read, Part II: What Are You Reading For?

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Everybody picks the books they read for some reason. They are looking for something out of their reading material that life hasn't given them.  An escape from harsh realities, new insight on a subject that interests them, comfort in times of emotional distress.

My mother, for instance, has had a very stressful job for most of her life.  She is a pediatric nurse, and she has spent the bulk of her career surrounded by very sick children; many of them so sick that they were having life-saving (or threatening) surgeries.  Her job had caused her untold amounts of emotional distress and though she makes a huge difference in the improvement of these children's lives, the ones that don't get better eat away at her.

Serenity now!

So is it any surprise that the books my mother reads are often books with happy endings or messages of hope?  That the books she enjoys the most are the ones that put a cheerful spin on the ways of the world?  I don't think so.  She comes home from a hard day and looks forward to picking up a book where life is good and the people are kind.

My boyfriend, on the other hand, is into nonfiction.  He likes to read about science and the way the universe works, planets and constellations and avian aerodynamics and how salamanders live underwater.  He is a chef, so after high school, he went to culinary school, eschewing the formal education that he would've gotten from going to college.  I know that he often laments not getting the knowledge that would've come out of college, though I don't tell them that the hunger he has for mental stimulation is a lot more intense than most people I knew even when I was going for my PhD.

"Hey Rach, did you know that the word 'giraffe' is derived from an Arabic word that means 'to move swiftly?'"

That said, the materials that fill his reading time are, not surprisingly, things that fill his need for challenge, for learning, for understanding the mechanics of the world around him.
My sister is fifteen years old, and I have watched her development as a reader with much interest.  She has never been as into reading as the rest of the family (my mother went through books like they were candy and my father is a librarian, for Pete's sake), but when she gets into a book, shereally gets into it.  I guess part of that is just the fervor of the very young, the way they latch onto things they love more as things that define who they are than anything else.  But part of it is also that my sister is an extremely sensitive soul with an artistic heart, and loyal almost to a fault.  She loves things intensely, with her whole being, and the books she reads are no different.

OMG. Srsly?

My sister reads books that open up parts of the world to her that she hasn't grown into yet.  Her pre-pubescent years were taken up with the Twilight books, because they opened up the idea of romance to her for the very first time.  She's really into Ellen Hopkins's novels in verse, which speak to both the poet inside her and the teenager curious about the darker, more difficult side of life.  And right now she's reading the final installment of The Hunger Games trilogy -- what better books to read for a fifteen-year-old struggling to assert herself as an independent woman?

The books that we read say a lot about us; about who we are and who we want to be, as well as what we want from our lives.  What books are you into right now, and what do you think they say about you?

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The Pollyanna Game

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Have you ever seen the movie "Pollyanna?" If you're my age (late 20's, I'm afraid) or older, my guess is that you have.  But if you're much younger than me, I'm guessing that you probably haven't.  If you happened to miss out on this movie, the basic gist of it is that this little orphan girl, Pollyanna, goes to live with her mean aunt in a town chock-full of unabashed grumps, and by virtue of her sunny disposition, manages to turn all of their various and sundry frowns upside-down.



It is a very cheerful, feel-good kind of movie.  It's a Disney movie.

The Pollyanna Game, then, following the cheery vibe of the movie, is a game of looking on the bright side of things.  I learned it from my friend Brooke in about the 8th grade, and I remember it from time to time when I'm feeling bummed or cranky.  It goes, "Let us not be sad that *insert crappy thing here;* let us be glad that *insert upside here.*"  Basically, it's an exercise in optimism.

For instance: Let us not be sad that we still haven't found a real job; let us be glad that we have found any job at all.

Or: Let us not be sad that our phone broke; let us be glad that we don't have to get those annoying promotional texts anymore.

In that vein, here's a story:  A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker asked me how the writing was going, and whether I'd heard anything hood from any agents.  I launched into my usual rant about how I felt like I had wasted all the years I spent working on my novel, and how I was finding it hard to get motivated to work on my next project.

Everything sucks! Everybody's a jerk!

 

My lovely co-worker stopped me and he said, "You wrote a book."

"But nobody cares."

"I care.  You care.  Lots of people care.  It's a big thing you did.  You should be proud of yourself."

It kind of stopped me in my tracks, because dammit, he was right.  I wrote a freaking book.  A good one.  And there was a time when that made me feel good about myself, made me feel proud and accomplished and worthy of respect.  And somewhere along the rocky road to publishing, I lost that feeling of pride and accomplishment.  I somehow stopped believing in my abilities, stopped being confident that this is the life for me.

I could do some work, but staring into space seems so much more meaningful.

 

Because it's hard.  It's really, really hard.  Being told no all the time, being constantly broke, feeling like I'm a failure.

But I'm not a failure.  I did exactly what I set out to do when I got out of school.  I wrote a book that meant something to me, that was engaging and well-written, that I can stand behind with pride.  I did everything that I can do to make it great, and I can't stake my feelings of self-worth on what other people think about it.  I have never been the kind of person that needs someone else's approval to feel good about herself, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna start now.



In summary:  Let us not be sad that agents don't want our book; let us be glad that we are so badass that we wrote a mother-fracking book!

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You Are What You Read, Part I: The High School Years

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When I was in high school, I had very strong ideas about what made something good.  This is not, I suppose, an uncommon trait to find in teenagers, but I was particularly militant about my preferences, especially when it came to books, movies, and music.  Put simply, I was an intolerable snob.  There were certain books I thought were below me.  As far as I was concerned, they were stupid, pointless, and without soul.  Had I ever so much as cracked one of these books?  Nope.  I didn't need to.  In fact, I think that I believed to read a book that I felt was too "commercial" would somehow taint me, that it would turn me into a Britney Spears-loving hot pink-wearing lollipop-sucking droolspot -- the kind of girl I loathed more than anything else in the world.  This is the same reason that I refused to wear skirts (un-feminist), listen to anything but college radio (un-indie), or go see any movie that wasn't either in black and white or a foreign language (un-intelligent).

Basically, I was a chubby, bespectacled Jessie Spano.

I want to assure my readers that these days, I am much more relaxed in my judgements.  The only books I hate nowadays are the ones that weren't written by their authors (Snooki, James Patterson, etc).  I am a proud Will Smith fan, and whenever ABBA comes on the radio, I turn it way the hell up.  In other words, I have learned to appreciate the things in life that are there solely for entertainment, the things that exist for no other purpose than to give pleasure to those that consume them.

Who wouldn't love this guy?

When I was in high school, my favorite books were Harry Potter, High Fidelity, and The Handmaid's Tale, all of which I still love to this day.  But they do say a great deal about who I was back then:
Harry Potter was written for children, not for adults.  Perhaps I was just on the cusp of the target audience for this series, but I am sure that J.K. Rowling did not have seventeen-year-olds in mind when she wrote The Philospher's/Sorcerer's Stone.  So what does it say about me that I loved Harry Potter?  I was deep in the painful throes of adolescence, angsty as all hell, fighting with my mother, awkward in my body, longing for love and acceptance from my peers.  Wasn't I looking at the eleven-year-old hero of that book wit longing for simpler times?  For a world where every problem could be solved by magic?  And Harry Potter's mother was dead!  She never bothered him about doing the dishes, or making better grades, or going to see certain bands.  Harry Potter filled my need to hold onto my childhood a little bit longer.



High Fidelity is a book about one of the snobbiest music lovers of all time.  Seriously.  This is a man who owns a record shop, but will only sell a record to somebody if he likes their taste in music and their knowledge of the subject.  And I absolutely idolized him for it.  Seriously.  I actually bought more than one album because it was discussed at length in the book, and if I didn't like the music immediately, I listened to it over and over again until I did.  I thought that music was something to be learned, that taste was to be honed and heightened and then lorded over other people, not to be enjoyed.  And even though the novel's protagonist learns (sort of) by the end to accept that other people have different opinions from his own, when I first read High Fidelity, I used it as a sort of indie-girl music snob's bible.



The Handmaid's Tale I read for the first time in 8th grade.  I borrowed it from the school library during my lunch period and read it in about two days (I have read it about ten times since then, and it has never taken me longer than that first time to get to the end).  This book had everything: sex, women learning to be empowered, and my mother's disapproval (probably because of the sex). As a thirteen-year-old girl, I was just learning about the unfairness of womanhood, how boys' interests and opinions seemed to always be put ahead of my own, how I felt pressured to focus all my energy on attracting male attention.  The hero in The Handmaid's Tale, Offred, lives in a world where women exist for the sole purpose of reproducing for men, and she struggles to keep a grasp of who she is as a person in such a world.  My teenage self could relate, and my teenage self rejoiced when Offred found a way to buck the system.  I loved tales of rebellion then, and I still love them now.



What were your favorite things to read in school?  Why?

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Writing For Yourself

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As many of you have probably heard already, the great children's book writer Maurice Sendak died today.  While not entirely unexpected (he was 83 and had been in poor health for quite a while), his death saddened me a lot.  Outside Over There was one of my favorite books as a kid -- it was creepy and full of adventure and I could identify with the story, as it was about the love-hate relationships of older siblings and their younger counterparts (I am a big sister myself).



When I read about Sendak's death this afternoon, I immediately thought of his recent interview on Fresh Air, which you can find here.  It's a really sad, touching interview, and I remember getting teary-eyed the first time I listened to it, so if you are an emotional listener, just be ready.  In the interview, Sendak talked about being old, about being aware of his closeness to death, of the fact that soon he would die.  And in talking about that, he said something that I found really interesting.  He said that he wrote only for himself now, that he wrote only things that interested him, that he'd always wanted to write, and nothing much else.

"I'm writing a poem right now about a nose.," Sendak said.  "I've always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it's a ludicrous subject. That's why, when I was younger, I was afraid of [writing] something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter."

What a gift it must have been, to be able to look at his work that way.  To only write because he felt like writing, to write it and not to care if anybody ever read it or liked it (though they probably would want to do both, I'm sure).  It's a thing that I struggle with every time I start to write something new, and I continue to struggle with it the entire time I'm writing.  Because I can never get rid of that imaginary audience in my head, that cruel, nitpicky class of readers jeering my every word choice.  I've struggled with it since I decided I wanted writing to be my career, because the reader is a necessary part of writing professionally.

The imaginary readers stole my creativity and left a dummy in its place.

It's not the same as it was when I was a kid.  I wrote constantly, without filter, and I think that part of the reason I could do that was because I had not ever considered the fact that if anyone read my stories, they would judge them.  They would judge the merits of the story, the believability of the characters, the words I used and the way I used them.  I didn't fear improper punctuation or cliched phrases, because I didn't care about my readers. So it was easy to sit down and just write what I wanted to write.
As soon as I made the decision to pursue publication, everything about the way I wrote changed.  There was a new pressure there, a new guilt that came with time spent doing other things.  There was a new panic when I thought of a new story, this voice in the back of my head that squeaked, "But will anybody like it???"  Writing became something hard, something stressful, something that had to be done.  And I think now that a lot of the reason for that stress was the imagined reader.

They hate his work.

It's become worse since I finished my novel and sent it into the publishing fray.  Rejection after rejection comes back to me with reason after reason for that dreaded phrase, "No thanks."  So when I try to write something new, I'm automatically thinking, How can I make this sellable?  How can I make them want to take it on?

This is terrible thinking, people.  As artists, we are not supposed to worry about what kind of a reception our work is going to get, especially not before we're even finished with it.  And while it is important, if you're going to be making a (supposed) living off of your work, to create something that can communicate with people, your work will be dead before it hits the water if you get too concerned with what people are going to think about it from the very beginning.

I want to get back to a place where writing is just something I do because I want to do it.  I want to be like the little girl I once was, sitting in the corner with a pencil and a notebook scribbling away, because the story in my head was too good to stay there.  I want to kill off that dissatisfied audience in my head, turn them out of the place and send them to some other person's stories.  I want to write a poem about a nose, dammit, and I don't want to care who likes it.

He's naked cuz he feels like it.

 

 

 

 

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