In all the talk about writing, I am thinking about why we even try, backpedaling to why we read. According to Stephen King, “The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing.” (On Writing) What I want to understand, though, is not the intellectual benefits of reading, but why we take such pleasure in it.
Among the highest compliments you can earn is that your work made me laugh or cry. You evoked a physical response. I watch the guys in the octagon at the gym: their blows land with impact. To think—that’s what words do. Some time back, a post I stumbled on cut open a deep, quiet wound. Good writing. A chemical reaction between the words and me. If we were able to maintain our distance, remind ourselves it’s just a poem or piece of fiction, we wouldn’t respond with our body, sensibilities, memory. King says, “The object of fiction is…to make the reader welcome and then tell a story…to make him forget, whenever possible, that he is reading a story at all.” That your writing drew someone in is high praise. As a teenager, I sought out this transformed reality in the proverbial escape into books away from my unhappiness. We like to lose this world, our very self, in a good book. But reading isn’t just anesthesia or a verbal trip to the theme park. We’re not only running from something, in many cases, but running to.
RECOGNITION
According to King, “If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition.” Effective writing often taps our autobiography, our preoccupation with Self. Such writing sights the strands in the reader’s own story—of love, sacrifice, heartache, mystery. I was hard-pressed to flip a page without laughing in Notes from the Underwire, former child actress Quinn Cummings’ account of her adventures from the early years into motherland. But I found myself tearing up in the chapter on the dog. Through the fun description of the mutt she had adopted and trained, she took me through the pain of losing him. In one of the most poignant chapters in the book, Cummings made me care, speaking into my experience of the regret of mistakes, of loss, of coming up short. This response from one who will let her son get a tattoo before he does a pet.
We happily settle into the cheap paperback fling not only because we daydream the thrill of courtship but because it answers our inmost longing to be romanced by life. The horror genre? Apart from how interesting he is, the boogeyman is someone we all know. We’ve all been afraid. Whether of a person or the voice in the dark that murmurs you’re not good enough. King says he writes so the reader can lift the truth from the web of his fiction. We love suspense for the unpredictability it reflects of our life, the questions we live daily. Why does the battle between good and evil remain a classic theme and not a cliché? We don’t tire of it because justice is the assent of the spirit, redemption its cry.
But we want more than a mirror of our own tale, especially when there is so much of the painful in it. Compelling writing also echoes the story under our story. It is the yearning for the distant country C.S. Lewis saw, the hopeful suspicion that the five mortal senses are not the arbiter of reality. And just behind the familiar, we discover possibility.
POSSIBILITY
Suffering and beauty lift us out of self-absorption to something greater than ourself. Humor, too, a touch of beauty for its dip into joy, helps us get over our bad self for the moment. There is lightness. Life isn’t just shuffling along under a load. We can set it down, trust that Someone or something’s got our back—God or friend or peace with self. When we hope or even fear as we ought from the lessons of literature and poetry, we realize a fresh reverence. Privy to the vast range of possibilities ancient and modern tales disclose, we learn new ways of responding to challenges and can exchange the load for a dream.
AND SO, THIS THING CALLED WRITING
Why show, not tell? Why go to lengths to paint it in a poem or novel when you can simply say She was beautiful. It was horrific. The universe takes my breath away? It is the ironic insufficiency of the human word that has seen writers and sages from the first incarnate Whisper straining to describe the fullness of experience so those on the other side of the story can see, hear, feel for themselves. If you take this illustration for egoism, I’ll risk it: I was taken aback yesterday by a comment that my poem — know? was “satisfying.” While inviting survey, it seemed a commendation every writer would embrace. Webster’s top three definitions of satisfy:
1. to fulfill the desires, expectations, needs, or demands of; give full contentment to
2. to put an end to (a desire, want, need, etc.) by sufficient or ample provision
3. to give assurance to; convince: to satisfy oneself by investigation
God knows I never imagined the poem fulfilled anyone’s needs. I considered it decent enough to share when it sufficiently confided my mystified reverence for the Mystery that makes itself plain but remains inscrutable. But my thoughtful reader Monica found the pulse of the human heart. We hope from—even demand of—our reading that it deliver us from the tyranny of the mundane. There is more to life than these four walls. And the soul sings, in reader and writer, to spy something larger behind that corner up ahead. It is the Narnia adults follow kids into.
Writing with you has been magical.
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