Of Backstory, Forgotten Stakes, and Remembering What You Love

It actually starts like this …

A girl who lives on a farm on the outskirts of a tiny Pennsylvania town loves to read.

Fantasy, mostly. Books about dragons and unicorns and magic.

But it isn’t enough just to read these stories. She loves to create her own. She imagines that her two best friends are her sisters, and they ride around that tiny town on unicorns solving mysteries and stopping villains.

She types out those stories on a clunky keyboard that she will one day pop all the keys off of to rearrange in alphabetical order. (The fact that the keyboard will then spew nonsense is one of her greatest disappointments and earliest horrors.) The text on the screen is ginormous, heavily pixilated, and illustrated with blocky clipart. Printing them is a loud, slow affair that requires tearing each page apart and carefully removing the hole-punched strips from each side. (RIP dot matrix printers.)

Word processing will evolve with her writing skills, though she still, thirty years later, will be writing about triplets, even though she never had a sister of her own. Those triplets no longer live in her hometown. They’re now cruising through the solar system.

At some point in elementary school she’ll go to Young Readers Young Writers camp, where one of her stories will be featured in a statewide anthology–her first publication credit. The Blue Sphere is about a normal girl who gets transported to a magical world. There are, as there often were, unicorns.

There is not–alas–a whole lot of character development.

“Why do you always write about imaginary places?” her mother will ask her.

She couldn’t explain then. Let’s see how I do now.

Searching for Backstory

Reading and writing are always tied together. To be a good writer, you need to read, read, read. According to Stephen King, anyway, and probably every writing professor ever.

And I loved to read, read, read, ever since elementary school.

But it wasn’t until I started ruminating about this blog that I realized I couldn’t pinpoint why.

Neither of my parents are readers. My dad reads the newspaper and my mom reads articles on the computer and that’s about the extent of it. Never novels.

I don’t have a single memory of them reading to me. I asked my mom about that. She said I was a screaming, colicky baby (which I knew) and my father often read to me to calm me down (which I didn’t know). Perhaps I internalized those story times with Dad, but I don’t remember them.

I don’t remember teachers reading to me. Grandparents. Babysitters.

They did, presumably. But I can’t recall.

I do remember my godmother giving me a book–some kind of big, hardcovered early reader anthology with lots of different stories in it. It must have made some impression. It wasn’t fine literature. Maybe I was in love with my new capabilities. That I could read it on my own.

There are home videos of me as a toddler, paging through books and babbling away. I clearly believed I knew what the pages contained, even though I wasn’t yet capable of words. Or maybe I was filling them with my own tales.

I can’t explain that yearning in me, my desire to absorb stories and spit them back out. All I know for sure is that it’s always been there, before memories or even language. Encoded somewhere in my very being, a gift given to me by the ultimate storyteller Himself when I was knit together in my mother’s womb. Something pivotal to who I am, and who I’m meant to be.

I’m grateful for this gift, and lucky to recognize it. What I’ve been meant to do has always been there, spinning in the back of my mind. I know not everyone is born with such clarity. But a dreamed deferred carries its own angst.

Sometimes the Universe Mails You a Reminder

Flash forward a bit, to my senior year in high school, when Amherst College sent me a program for Accepted Students Weekend. On the cover was the poem The Writer by Richard Wilbur.

All my life I’ve collected quotes and lyrics that speak to me–often about my discontent in recognizing a life I’m not yet living. The Writer had that lasting resonance. I taped that program to my desk and stared at it every time I sat down at a computer for years.

I know what some of you are thinking. “Poetry. Blah. I haven’t read a poem since 12th grade and I’m not breaking that streak today.”

Which is fine. But I think this poem is pretty straightforward, and the rest of my post will make more sense if you take just a few minutes to read it. I’ll wait.

The poem is actually about two writers–the poet himself and his young daughter, who’s writing some kind of a story on a typewriter. (Oh how quaint.)

When I was seventeen I identified so much with that girl:

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:

I wish her a lucky passage.

Richard Wilbur, The Writer

All the stories inside me felt heavy. I’d already discovered the bare bones of the tale I’m still trying to tell in my current novel. But my youth seemed an impediment. Who besides myself would take me seriously?

And okay, maybe I liked the poem because I could relate to its central image of a wild bird trapped indoors. I grew up in an old farmhouse, and have several memories of a “sleek, wild, dark and iridescent creature” making its way inside. Unlike in the poem, my mother always shouted, “It’s a bat,” while my father claimed, “It’s a bird,” and I removed myself from the situation rather than discovering who was right. (There was one time, several years later, on the buffet deck of a cruise ship, when it was definitely a bat, much to the chagrin of the lovely stranger I’d later share a table with at the formal dining hall.)

It’s only now, thinking back on my favorite poem, that I realize how much I was that bird, for two abandoned careers spanning roughly fourteen years. Flying against the window again and again, so desperate for the freedom outside but hurting myself because my aim was misguided. To steal a lyric from Taylor Swift, “Long story short it was a bad time.”

I hope you’ve never felt like that. But if you’re reading this now you probably have. Perhaps you still do.

I can promise you from personal experience: it feels so good when you finally make it out the window.

Don’t Forget the Stakes

As I grew older, my age no longer quite the impediment, it became the last stanza that haunted me.

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish

What I wished you before, but harder.

Richard Wilbur, The Writer

I don’t want to be melodramatic here. I hope you’re all living safe, comfortable lives as many have not been afforded throughout history. I’ve always had my needs met, my bills paid. Family and friends and relatively good health. My body’s only betrayed me when I stop caring for it properly. I know many are not so lucky, and wish that were not so.

But maybe comfort and stability are nearly as dangerous as an enemy at the door.

I will preface this by reminding you that I love comfort and stability. There’s a safety in knowing exactly what’s going to happen next, because it’s the same thing that happened yesterday. There’s something in my personality that craves that knowing.

I’ve lost more than a decade of my life to that craving.

But perceived comfort isn’t always actually that comfortable, it’s just what you’re used to. And what you’re used to might be wishing away your days, always yearning for each weekend, which honestly might be just as unfulfilling as your weekdays, but you’ve gotten used to pretending it’s better.

It’s so easy to forget that there can be more to life. That there should be more. That stability I let myself by trapped in didn’t actually make me happy. Even while doing jobs I liked there was still a discontent thrumming in the back of my mind, making me read that darn poem over and over.

Because I had figured out what that last stanza meant. Every day you’re not actively living is a day you’re just slowly dying.

It is always a matter of life or death, as I had forgotten. Life is precious, and there are no guarantees. We don’t know when death will come for us. If I don’t make it to tonight, I don’t want to spend my last day wishing for a future I may not even have.

That little girl was meant to tell stories, and the women she grew into forgot that for awhile, like Susan forgot Narnia. Her aim wasn’t true. She hit the wall a few times.

But eventually she made it through the window. And now she soars.

Dreaming of Other Worlds

So why do I write about imaginary places?

I’ve just taken a whole lot of words to say that I don’t know. Just like my love of reading there’s no specific memory. No moment of decision. It’s just what I’ve always done.

Maybe my soul has always known that this isn’t where I’m meant to be. My safe, ordinary, humdrum life could never satisfy the yearning for adventure, the glittering, glorious world I will see one day but not yet. A world of saviors and heroes, epic stakes, and a lot of wonder that does not need to be explained.

As an adult I know I prefer books far removed from the real problems found in the news. I’d rather read about quests than chronic illness. Magic than addiction. I like my heroes and heroines to triumph over struggles I will never face. A few months before I volunteered as tribute I had a horrible dream that aliens were invading, just like in The Fifth Wave, but also there was absolutely no inventory of the product I was in charge of selling. That particular mashup became extra haunting weeks later when we did, indeed, have very little inventory. The primary conflict of my work-in-progress space opera is not, I promise, supply chain disruption, although I would be able to depict that quite accurately.

Escapism is, perhaps, a bit counter to the message I’m trying to share. I am trying to expand my genre preferences. To not shy away from difficult but powerful stories that are more likely to be true. We’re all still works in progress.

Perhaps I write about other worlds because those are the stories I’m meant to tell.

Find What You Want to Do on Your Day Off

I know that I’m lucky. I found what I loved without needing to search. While writing fiction may not be the most practical path, its trailhead was clearly marked in my life.

When I was telling one of my former colleagues that I was leaving the company to finish my manuscript she said to me, “I wish I could do something like that. But I don’t know what I’d do.”

I may not be the best one to speak on that problem, but here’s my suggestion. Take some time to reflect on what you really enjoy. Not what your parents or your degree or your paycheck tells you you should enjoy. Was there something you loved as a kid, back before someone–maybe the world at large, that dastardly realistic world that I never wanted to write about–told you you shouldn’t?

Not everyone’s meant to be artists–probably–but I believe everyone has some sort of purpose. Can spend their time in a way that leaves them fulfilled rather than miserable. There is something out there you could be doing that would distract you from your need to sleep in and watch Netflix.

At both my previous jobs, I loved days off. I complained about every holiday we needed to work through that other lucky souls didn’t. Even when I liked my job, on those days I strongly preferred not doing it.

Right now I make my own schedule. Aside from the deadlines I set for myself and the knowledge my funds won’t last forever, I could take off any days I choose, holiday or not.

On President’s Day I went in to my coworking space to work on my book. Good Friday too. Without complaint, and completely on my own accord.

Why? Because I’d rather be writing than spending a lazy day in my apartment.

Living, rather than slowly dying.

So maybe that’s the question to ask yourself. Can you imagine something you’d rather do than take a day off? Not out of guilt, or stress, or workaholic tendencies. But because you so enjoy doing that thing that you know it really would be the best use of your time.

I am not discounting self-care or a healthy work/life balance. I take weekends off, and there are plenty of holidays where I didn’t go into my office. I’m not advising you to voluntarily work through every proffered day off. I just want you to imagine a life where you care so much about what you’re doing every day that it isn’t a hardship or an obligation–it’s a nourishing purpose that you’d choose over wasting time.

That doesn’t have to mean a dramatic career change. Though if I inspire you to make a dramatic career change I would love to hear about it. Maybe you need to find a better way to use your time outside of work. Maybe this post inspires you to think about your hobbies, or your relationships, or your attitude toward your day to day life.

Every story is unique, and yours may be quite different than mine.

But it is always a matter, dear reader, of life or death, as I had forgotten.

And I wish what I wished you before, but harder.