Imagine you are sixteen and you have been reading books for as long as you can remember. Reading stories. Words were magic. Sentences were magic weaved into spells.
And what kept you spellbound were stories, for hours at end. Your father used to take you to the state library every Saturday and you would borrow as many books as you were allowed to (two books first, as a young reader, then four books as you got older).
Inevitably you would finish the books in a day or two, at most, and spend the rest of the week re-reading the stories until you could return to the library and exchange these books for new ones. New stories. More magic.
Now you are sixteen and you see a small advertisement in the newspapers. (Your family would keep a standing order for two major English dailies at the very least for many, many years, back when they couldn’t afford much else – but words one must not do without, for the news, the knowledge, the stories.)
A solicitation for short stories. Any subject would do. New writers welcomed. Fresh blood for the readers, maybe. You are tempted, very. But you cannot write; you do not know how to. You are only a reader.
Imagine you are twenty-five and you are back in your parents’ home. You have completed your Master’s degree but you are still waiting for a job. The economy’s not good. You send out job applications and you hope for a call back for an interview. You wait, as others do.
No more studying left to do, so an idle mind lead idle hands to where they would go. The Internet. Not for porn, mind. You would never.
(Or rather, an alternative explanation closer to the truth: Back then, ancients still called the Internet the World Wide Web. Given your dial-up connection in those days, the old joke rang true unfortunately: it was a World Wide Wait. Too slow for pornography, alas.)
Instead, you write. You write every day. You post them on your blog, these little entries, these short posts, these musings, these mood pieces (as an editor would call them, a couple of years later, when she read them) – call them anything you like. Just don’t call them stories.
You don’t do stories. You don’t know how.
Imagine you are sitting on a chair, a very small one, far too short for someone of your height. You crouch over the microphone, adjusting it nervously like the Hunchback of Notre Dame might over a fine silver fork or a perfect moonlit rose.
You dare not look up. It’s a warm Saturday afternoon and you can hear the irritated shuffling of an audience waiting for you to start. (They are not, you remind yourself, your audience. This is a mistake, and they know you are a fraud.) You can smell their sweat and their disapproval. Get on with it.
You dare not look up. But looking down may be worse. The sheets of printed paper upon your lap are in disarray, the carefully prepared order messed up before it was even your turn. Behind you, a series of connected canvasses painted with a gristly scene – a lineup of disembodied pig’s heads staring down at you as though you were their executioner. They are accusing you of the greatest crime: You are not a writer; so, what are you doing here?
You are sixteen and you are foolish. You have thick skin (that will get thinner and thinner the older you get, but you don’t know this yet). So you sit down and you write, by longhand, what couldn’t possibly be a story, but has to be, for a month or so later, it’s published. Two entire pages, right smack in the middle of the paper, better than a Playboy centrefold.
You use long words you barely understand (there used to be a term for these words – bombastic – as though they detonated every time they were read aloud, like a breed of particularly nasty but well-timed farts) and the title of your story is even longer and needlessly esoteric (‘All Daisies Grow From Your Body Well’).
(Wait, do you mean “esoteric” or is it “elusive” that you are looking for? One of those damn bombastic words, at any rate.)
It doesn’t matter. You are published. You wrote and they accepted your words. They have acknowledged what you have created – this is worthy of printing, this is a story.
Later, you wonder if it weren’t simply a slow news day.
You are twenty-five and instead of living the high life of a young corporate upstart wining and dining and generally leading an enviable, charmed existence, you are wondering what the fuck you were thinking, doing yet another degree?
Yet. This time off, after a fashion, caught between the university years and the rat race, is an unexpected boon. Time for you, and only you. A precious commodity. And your little blog posts, your little non-stories, the ones you have left on the World Wide Web to fend for themselves, why, folks other than your friends are reading them.
You know this because they are leaving comments. They are telling you how they feel, after reading these snapshots you have taken with your imagination. They tell you they connect, they tell you they know what it feels like. They wonder, how do you know, what it feels like?
You don’t know. You have no answers for them. But you continue to write. Used to be you couldn’t. Now it’s all you know. It’s all you have.
You are sitting on the damned chair, the microphone in front of you, and you think to yourself, you might as well read. You haven’t anywhere else better to go, and as you soon find out, there is nothing else better to do.
Reading.
You told yourself, when you were sixteen, that you were only a reader. Perhaps that is still true. Perhaps that will always be true.
You love reading. You love stories. This is what you will always do.
Oh but why didn’t anyone tell you? Oh why didn’t anyone one persuade you, before? There are no spotlights here, there is no discernable sound system, but you do not care. The audience certainly doesn’t. They listen. They swallow every word. And they want more.
They are hungry for words, they are hungry for your stories. For the span between the beginning of one tale and its end, to the beginning of another, you have their complete attention. And they have yours.
In that moment, you know. They are readers, too. They love stories too, just like you.
And before you whisper the words “The End”, you are already smiling because you know it isn’t. There will always be more stories. You know, because you will be reading them.