Im Either Dead Or Remodeling My Kitchen

A few things Gabriel García Marquez said or quoted others saying in his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, are these: “Many times in my life I have had to interrupt my education to go to school,” and “Don’t write if you think you can live without it.” He also tells the story of the life-changing train ride with his mother to a small Colombian town to sell the house of his childhood. When his mother asks him what he is thinking about, he replies “I’m writing.” If you are a writer, or you have ever thought you might dabble in the intellectual, physical, and emotional agony that is the craft of writing, you may identify with this concept. At any point in a day of my life, someone could ask me what I am thinking and it would be true to tell them, I am writing. This reminds me of something Kanye WestKanye West says in a song, “I forgot better things than you ever thought of.” Grammar aside, this holds true for one who has ignored the creative writing class’ directions: Keep a journal. Journals are supposed to be necessary to trap little moments that writers keep as golden coins in order to pay the devil later for inspiration, calling out loved ones by recording their deepest secrets, embarrassing strangers by using an overheard conversation as the basis for a story element. And those moments are invaluable, fleeting however. But those damn creative writing books may as well say, alienate yourself socially by scribbling madly whenever something inspirational pops into your head and put it into a battered little leather thing and hope it seems like creative genius when you attempt to reread it later. (Really you’ll be wondering what was so allegorically meaningful about the burp form the Indian man on the bus that afternoon.) So, you can either take the journal option or get a great f***ing memory. There is option C, type your inspirations quickly into the NOTEPAD function of your cell phone and it looks as though you are texting someone. I do this because I cannot live without writing. For the same reason, I write.

If you keep a journal, you are not supposed to feel bad about what you write, if you are GGM (Gabriel Garcia MarquezGabriel Garcia Marquez) you are spelling everything hideously and your editors appeal to your ego by claiming they thought they were typos, you forget about sentence structure, run-ons, third person narratives, cohesive thoughts, etc. (just as I am doing in this great piece of literary garbage.) You write what you think and if there happens to be something worthwhile when you re-read your jargon later on (if you can bare to stomach reading what you thought was so meaningful at the time and which you will surely discover is complete dung and horse-wallop upon your re-visitation), you take it and rework it. –like stale dough. You pick up that limp, wet, crusty piece of embryonic bread that you made and think, how the hell am I going to get this to look like something edible? You hope your bread will come out after baking it for hours and then you realize the dough was bad anyway, so you might as well just toss the whole thing and start fresh, like with fresh flour. Then you realize you spent sixteen dollars (sixteen hours of precious time when you should have been eating) on organic flour (a new macbook laptop that was supposed to be more inspirational to write on) and you still don’t even know how to bake bread. (Using this comparison, the dough that comes prepackaged in those weird combustible rolls of cardboard could thus by synonymous to a writing prompt. Or plagiarism.) At this point you may torch your kitchen, or you may just keep trying until you’ve got a loaf of bread that, though lopsided, tastes all right. But, according to GGM or one of his inspirational deities, you are not a writer if you have torched your kitchen by now and moved on to bartending and icy vodka. You cannot live without writing, so at this point, you are either dead or remodeling your kitchen.

What makes someone a writer? Well, from reading the biographies, and especially the autobiographies, of many famous authors, I have come to the conclusion that it is insanity. Most genius writers spend childhood sickly, pale, fragile, or seemingly mentally insane. If it is not obvious at first glance, look closer. On the inside, we are all supremely f***** up. Jodi PicoultJodi Picoult says she had a wonderfully happy childhood and could not have asked for a more charmed upbringing. I say, what the hell are you hiding Jodi? If there is anyone we should watch out for, it is her because she is obviously a serial killer. Every writer sees enough of the dark sides of life to be able to understand a person’s psyche. Authors have a unique understanding of the yin and yang, the happy and the dark, the shining and the repressed side of human nature. How else could we understand people enough to imagine them and be able to recreate their most intimate thoughts on paper? No sane person can make up entire universes, stories, characters, and situations and put them down with enough clarity onto paper so that others, the sane ones, can read, understand, and even enjoy them. This takes talent, a talent of the mentally “slanted” or “unfit” or “disheveled.” Normal thought processes don’t include struggling over the correct adjective for a man on the corner. They don’t include the imbibing of human behavior from the environment only to break it apart, turn it around, and rearrange it into a cohesive alternate reality. So, to be a writer, you have to be slightly, well, let’s say affected.

What has me affected enough to be a writer? Everything. Being a writer makes you sensitive, like a weird tangle of nerves surrounds you and everything on the outside world sends too strong of signals into your interior. (Oh, and you feel a strange drive to write it all down.) Maybe it is reading. Another commonality among writers is that we all love to read. In biographies, authors are always “voraciously” reading “everything they can get their hands on.” I guess I am like this, and have been my whole life - although “voracious” arouses some carnivorous imagery that I am opposed to as a vegetarian. However the love of sentences, the drowning out of reality by a book’s magical realism, the pathway into the labyrinth of the author’s brain makes reading more than enjoyable, a definite necessity. A case in point: I was not the slightest bit interested in Spanish, the language, until after high school. I took French in grades 9-12 from a Romanian gentleman that, I’m convinced, spoke not a word of French and was named Ovid, (anything to avoid Spanish class with everyone else.) It would have been practical to take Spanish, but I have never been the type to do something just because it makes sense. However, my senior year I read, (should I say voraciously?), everything by Isabel AllendeIsabel Allende. I thought, this would be much better in the native language, in fact I never want to read a translation of anything ever again. In college I took Spanish, started work in a restaurant to pick up the slangy dialect of the kitchen staff, paired myself with a cute Mexican and in three years I was fluent. I read anything I can get my hands on in Spanish, especially the things originally written in Spanish. Things flow so much better, double meanings can be deciphered, and the beauty of the author’s word choice is authentic in their native language.

But just what sort of freak learns a language for the impractical use of reading literature written in it? The same sort of freak that can go hours without eating, drinking, and sometimes blinking in order to get the damn sentence on the page. The same sort of freak that thinks she is witnessing imaginary characters speak in her head, and that the only way to exorcise these conversations are to hurriedly peck them into a Microsoft Word document. The sort of freak that is a writer, through and through. So as I freakishly write, day in and day out, I struggle wholeheartedly with inner voices, a lack of enthusiasm, a lack of knowledge about punctuation, and a small man with a baseball bat who resides near my cerebellum and continues to beat me in the right occipital lobe of my brain when I write something I know is sh*t. It hurts. But what I need is an audience, feedback, a writing group, contact with those sane people I mentioned earlier who prefer to read and merely raise their eyebrows at the ones who decide to write and claim they hear inner voices. I need readers, a critic other than my mother, and a literary success, even if only a miniscule one.