What
Writing Means To Me
Around
the age of four, I fell in love with the letters of the alphabet. Following the
philosophy of the day, my parents would not teach me to read but spent dutiful
hours reading to me. The letter “y” and the “w” with all its syllables sounded
so exotic. I would hear my parents spell
out words (y-e-s spells “yes”), but I didn’t know which of the squiggles in my
books was a “y” or a “w.” Fascinating
and frustrating.
Then…school! I remember being so surprised at the
appearance of a “y.” What a
disappointing letter! It was squat and
had an appendage hanging down below the line.
I thought it should look more like a “b” or a “d.” As time went on, I
got used to its appearance and forgave the “y” for laying down on the job, so
to speak. I learned all my letters. Letters began to make words, words became
stories, and then teachers were asking me to write!
Was I a big girl or what?!
Since those grade school days, I have written skits, essays,
stories, policies and procedures, legal documents, books, anything else
assigned to me, and other stuff just for fun.
Writing is so self-indulgent that I often wonder why
everyone doesn’t spend their free time with a pen in hand (or a keyboard at
their fingers). Don’t like someone? Bump them off. Someone is a pompous jerk? Hold them up to ridicule. Spouse is an affront to the human race? Take a lover…between the pages.
Finally, serious fiction called to me. At least, I was serious about writing it,
primarily mysteries and horror. Distinct
genres in the bookstores, they are just slants on real life as far as I am
concerned. Mysteries have entertained me
all my reading life, so I try to return the favor. The analyst in me loves the precision of mystery
plot development, clues appearing all along the way but in a manner to elude or
mislead the reader. The clues have to be
there, the author must play fair.
Without the clues, the book becomes crime detection, another entertaining
genre but not a mystery. I particularly
like mysteries in which the reader figures out “who dun it” but the characters
don’t, plodding on in dull ignorance of the carnage all around them.
Like garlic, horror is a strong flavor best introduced slowly
until the reader is saturated with its odor.
Of all the literary genres, horror has the most difficulty in achieving
respectability, yet its power is the least diminished over time. Only the romance is as enduring. The fear of darkness, the sinking despair of
betrayal, the panic of confinement and torture, the irresistible urge to open
the locked door, these are all horror literary devices and still effective when
done skillfully.
I prefer
horror which is just one step outside of daily life, a small but jarring detail
only slightly out of place, like a piece of glass in your ice cream cone. Oh well, remove it and keep on eating. Licking.
Enjoying all that creamy coldness until you find another piece of glass,
and this one cuts. You look around and
everyone in the ice cream parlor is looking at you, and all of them are
bleeding from the mouth. And smiling.
You get the idea.
Regardless of what we write or how we write it, those words
on paper are our ticket to the grand show: the unbroken human story-telling
tradition that began on cave walls, got chiseled into stone tablets, engraved
and painted on pyramid chambers, copied laboriously by armies of scribes and
monks, and now flies through the ether according to physical principles that
most of us poorly understand if we understand them at all.
Why do we do it? Paid
or not, published or not, successful or not, we just want to tell a story. It’s the story that matters, not the method
or the language or even the writer.
And we
all know it.
JoAnna
Senger
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