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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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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Book People

I love the smell of books in the morning.

One of the best things about my day job is the variety of people I come across every day.  I wait on cops (the Dekalb County SWAT team are some of my favorite customers), rednecks, soccer moms and dads, hippies, hipsters, artists, politicians, bus drivers, mechanics, and --my favorites after the SWAT team -- book people.

Most of my book people are regulars, and part of the reason I love them is because they are so easy to wait on.  The food is almost secondary to the book, and as soon as they order, they crack it open (or turn it on, if they are e-reader people) and they are gone.  They don't need a whole lot, just their time alone with something good to read and a glass of wine to wash it down.  I like to watch their faces as they read, as their emotions change with the events in their books, the shock or the sadness or the laughter.

Most of the time, I leave the book people alone, because I know how annoying it is when you're in the middle of a good book and someone keeps interrupting you, even if they are interrupting you to talk about the book you are reading.  "Is it good?" they ask.  "Yes," I always want to say, "I'd like to keep on reading this good book."  Hint, hint.

But sometimes I just can't resist.  A few weeks ago, for instance, one of my customers came into the restaurant with Don DeLillo's Point Omega under his arm, and I just couldn't help myself.  Don DeLillo is one of my absolute favorite writers under the sun, and I hardly ever see people reading him.  Which, if you ask me, is one of the great travesties of our time, but I digress.  The point is, I just had to talk to him about the book, which is one that I hadn't read yet, and what followed was the kind of conversation that only happens between book people, gushing about dialogue and theme and words and stories.  This ten minute conversation put a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

A few days later, I was even more excited to find, upon starting my shift, that this lovely gentleman had dropped his copy of Point Omega off at the restaurant for me to read.  And this got me thinking about book people, and the beauty of books, and why book people are so devoted to them.  Books are someone else's thoughts, their questions, their answers, their passions, poured out onto a page and bundled up to share with other people.  We read them, and they become ours, and when we really love a book, we want to share it with our friends, our families, even strangers, because we feel part of ourselves in them.  They can make all of our troubles and neuroses feel valid.  They can make our lives seem better than we thought they were, or inspire us to try harder, to do better.  And when that happens, we want to share it.

Book people are sharers, I think.  We read a book we like and we pass it on to someone else, and we talk about how the book made us feel, how it changed our way of thinking about things, how it made us look at our lives from a new angle.  I love lending books I'm crazy about to my friends, so that we can enjoy the books together, because books are all about sharing ideas with other people.  And that's why I love them.

The Whole Vampire Thing

Oh, no! Don't bite me! (Please bite me.)

Okay, guys.  It's confession time: I read Twilight.  Not only did I read Twilight, but I also read New Moon and Eclipse and Breaking Dawn.  I'm not proud.  My little sister was about eleven at the time, and she's about the farthest thing in my family from a reader.  So when she was giddy with the excitement of finding out what happened to Bella and Edward, I was just happy to see her reading.  I wanted to support her.  I wanted to give her someone to talk about the books with (which is something I often wish I had), so I borrowed her copies of the books as she finished with them.  And since this is confession time, I have to admit that I really enjoyed the first book.  The second one was less fun for me -- I thought Bella was waaaaaay to distraught -- and by the third book, I was rolling my eyes almost constantly.  Seriously, I was getting headaches.  My sister still bemoans the way I laughed every time the word "Renesme" appeared in the (thankfully) final book of the saga.

The thing is, I could totally understand my sister's fascination with the Twilight books.  After all, I was watching horror movies with her since before she could string together a sentence.  She loves creepy, kooky, dangerous fiction almost as much as I do.  And I had my own version of vampire love when I was a teenager: Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire.  I read it the summer I turned sixteen, while I was spending the summer at my aunt's house in Florida.  She lent her copy to me and I remember being rapt.  I was up late flipping pages, re-reading passages.  The eerie gorgeousness of the characters, the danger, the immortality -- they call to a young girl.  And while Interview With the Vampire is infinitely  less ridiculous and better-written than the Twilight saga, it spoke to me the same way Twilight spoke to my little sister.

The reason I bring it up is because last night (after watching an episode of South Park making fun of Twi-hards) I had the most fascinating dream about vampires.  I won't go into all the details, because I don't want to confuse myself, but it started out at Fright Fest at Six Flags and ended in a dusty old Victorian mansion, and somewhere in between, I found myself taking notes for a novel WHILE STILL DREAMING.  This is an important point: Most of what I have actually written and finished in my life came from a dream.  My last novel and tons of short stories were all inspired by vivid dreams from which I could not escape upon waking.  So the fact that my dream self was scribbling down notes about the dream for a novel is majorly symbolic to me.  It's like my Muse is shaking my shoulders and screaming, "This is it, you idiot!  Write this down!"

We all know I am shopping for a new novel idea.  I thought I had one worked out, but I just couldn't get into writing it.  I've been really getting into sci-fi lately.  I've found that I enjoy reading it more than almost anything else, that it yanks me into its pages and won't let me go until the story is over.  Plus, it's Halloween, my absolute favorite time of the year in almost every way.  And I'm writing a ghost story.  So it's not really surprising that this is the sort of idea I would come up with right now.  So what's the big hang up?

It's this: Vampires are just so damned trendy.

I have never, never, never been into trends.  Jumping on the bandwagon is just not my thing.  And I can make myself feel better by saying that I've always loved vampires and creepy crawlies and zombies and werewolves and whatnot, but that doesn't change the fact that the vampire thing is sooooo popular right now that it's almost hard to take anything with vampires in it seriously (True Blood aside, folks -- I will take no dissing of True Blood).

That said, I have also never been one to ignore my instincts.  I have tried at times, lord, have I tried, but every time I ignore the whisper in the back of my head the whisper becomes a giant, steel-toed boot and kicks my ass until I do what it said in the first place.  So there's a very good chance that in the next year you fine people will start seeing new excerpts based on this here dream I had last night.
If I can figure out how to make it NOT about vampires.

Have You Tried This Reading Thing?

Reading together is twice the fun.

No, really.  Have you tried this reading thing?  It's great.  Really great.  I spent most of the last week reading the Hunger Games (this includes a lot of the time I was at work...and I assure you, it is very difficult to read a book and wait tables at the same time).  It was something of a revelation for me.  Or maybe more of a reminder.  "Hey, Rachel," it was saying, "You used to be like this all the time.  You used to be like Belle in 'Beauty and the Beast,' tripping over stuff because your nose was stuck in a book."

And it's true.  I used to read at least one book a week, sometimes two (though I seldom reached the threshold of three like I did this week).  I could barely put down one book before I reached for another, ad when I was younger, I didn't even wait that long.  I got halfway through one book and started another, reading up to three simultaneously, which, I admit, is a bit much.  The point is, I used to read a LOT.  And now I don't.  Which begs the question: What happened?

Growing up didn't help.  Having bills to pay, a relationship to nurture, friends not to neglect, and a job (although I guess we know by now that this doesn't necessarily stop me from reading) are all big hindrances.  But I think that the biggest roadblock has actually been my writing.  After grad school ended and I decided to concentrate on writing my novel and I no longer had assigned (albeit excellent) reading to attend to, I guess I just stopped reading.  Not altogether, but certainly with any zest.  If I was at home (or anywhere, really) with any time on my hands, I felt like I ought to be working on the book.  Where I used to keep a novel or two in my purse, I kept a blank book and a heap of pens instead.  I just felt guilty if I was reading.  I kept telling myself that I should be writing, instead.

Which is ridiculous, if you think about it.  We writers write because we love to (or need to), but we only came up with the idea because we love to read (or ought to, anyway -- anyone who doesn't like reading has absolutely NO business being a writer).  To ignore books as a writer is like being an actor who doesn't go to the theater (which is why I gave up acting, btw; I much prefer movies).  It's just counterproductive.

I had a professor while I was in grad school and during my short-lived stint reading for a PhD, James Ryan, who is a brilliant teacher and gave me one of the most useful pieces of advice on writing that I have gotten to date.  Being a writer, he said, is one part reading, one part writing, and one part living.  None of the parts are more important than the others.  Like I said, the man's brilliant.

So I guess the point of all this is to say that this past week has reminded me why I wanted to write in the first place.  I freakin' love books.  LOVE them.  And I swear, here and now, on this blog post, to the vastness that is the internet, and the significantly smaller (but more important) population that makes up actual readers of this blog, that I will never again neglect my books.  I feel like a better person when I read, a better writer, and a hell of a lot happier.

Even kittens understand.

Also, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to plug the books that brought on this epiphany.  If you haven't read The Hunger Games trilogy, you are wasting your time not reading them.  Drop everything and find a copy.  Do it now.  I'm not kidding.  Go.  Now.  Shoo.

Borders Closes...I Save

It strikes both fear and joy into my heart.

I know it should make me sad that Borders, one of the largest book retailers in the country, is going out of business.  I know that it implies a lot of distressing things about the state of literature in our society.  I know that it suggests even further that the paper book is going the way of the dodo.  I know that it means that the closest bookstore to my house will soon be gone, and my boyfriend and I will have to find someplace else to hang out on Saturday afternoons.

But part of me was thrilled -- THRILLED!!! -- to walk into the bookstore today and see it full of patrons.  It was more full than I have ever seen it outside of the weeks leading up to Christmas.  I saw one lady walk out with a shopping cart full of books.  Full.  We're talking, top and bottom and baby seat full of books.  I nudged my friend Chrissie (who was good enough to accompany me on the outing, despite having just stepped off a plane from India).  "Look at all the books!" I squealed.  "In my greatest dreams, I could buy that many books."

I did, in fact, manage to purchase one book, despite the meager wages I eke out as a waitress while I wait for that big three-book deal.  And you know why I could buy said book?  20% off all fiction.  Because Borders is closing.

So yes, I know that in the very near future, I will lament (and lament deeply) the loss of what was a truly wonderful place to hang out.  But for now, I'm just looking forward to cracking open Swamplandia!