Write for yourself

Let the reader in you influence the writer in you. Put yourself in the reader's place, then write what you'd like to read.

Patricia T. O'Conner, Words Fail Me

Patricia T. O'Conner

Patricia T. O'Conner's advice for writers — write what you want to read — may be the best advice any writer or would-be writer will ever hear. Some writers seem to do just opposite. They write whatever seems to be most successful at the time. Their work seems imitative, unoriginal. They follow a formula. And if what they write is half-way successful, they imitate themselves

I admire writers like Ann Patchett and Jane Smiley, who never seem to write two novels alike. When something catches their attention, they build a story around it. They write the stories they would like to read, and being avid readers, they don't want to read the same story over and over again.

For the past few years I have tried my hand at writing sermons — and sometimes preaching them. I realize now that this compulsion of mine has something to do with the fact that I have been listening to sermons all my life and found most of them forgettable. I wanted to try writing the kind of sermons I would like to hear.

I think a sermon should have something for the mind (it should be intellectually stimulating), something for the heart (it should stir emotions) and something for the spirit (it should in some way make the listener a better person). And it should be something that can be remembered for at least a day or two. Have I succeeded? I do not know. But I do know they are the kind of sermons I want to hear on Sundays.

Implausibility makes the story

Jane Smiley stopped me cold when I read this line in

Jane Smiley

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel: "Every form of the novel contains some basic implausibility."

Can she be right? Isn't plausibility something we look for in a novel? Don't we want a story we can believe? Don't we criticize novels that seem implausible? I know I do.

And yet the more I thought about it the more I realized that it is implausibility that, in some sense, makes the story. There can be too much implausibility, but there can also be too little. This is true of any story, not just a novel.

If you go to the grocery story to buy a dozen eggs, it doesn't make much of a story. It is entirely plausible. But if, while at the grocery story, you encounter someone you haven't seen in 20 years and whom you didn't know was within 500 miles of that grocery store, you would have a story you would want to tell somebody. The two of you being in the same grocery store at the same time was implausible, but that is what makes it a story worth sharing.

Just the fact that a boy would get on a raft with a runaway slave and float downriver seems implausible. And why would a runaway slave want to go south, not north? And yet here we have the basic plot of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of America's greatest novels.

What are the chances that an escaped prisoner encountered by a boy would one day become that boy's benefactor? Yet there, in that implausibility, you have the plot of Great Expectations, the notable Charles Dickens novel.

Implausibility makes a story. Too much of it can destroy it.

Being nice

Midway into Kim Ho-Yeon's lovely novel The Second Chance Convenience Store, one character says to another, "Pretending to be nice, even when you don't mean it, actually makes you nicer." The story is about a  man whose life fell apart because he wasn't very nice and who gets his second chance literally by being nicer to people.

Dokgo is a homeless alcoholic who spends most of his time in the Seoul train station. He has lost all memory of his previous life. He finds a woman's purse in the station, and it has the owner's phone number inside. Instead of just taking the money in the purse, he calls that number. The elderly woman is on a train, but returns as quickly as possible to reclaim her purse. She rewards Dokgo with free food from the convenience store she owns and eventually, when he agrees to stop drinking, she offers him the night-shift clerk's job at her store.

Now committed to being nice, despite his rough exterior, Dokgo manages to give the store itself a second chance by increasing nighttime business. He also changes the lives of several of the store's customers.

But then the woman's son, who wants her to sell the store and give him the money for a business investment, realizes that Dokgo is the obstacle he needs to eliminate to make this happen. He hires a private detective to discover who Dokgo really is.

Kim gives us a charming story about the power that can be found by simply being nice.

Our idea of heaven

Where shall we find the time and peace of mind to read the classics, overwhelmed as we are by the avalanche of current events?

Italo Calvino

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

In a way, Jorge Luis Borges answers Italo Calvino's question.

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges is not the only person to fantasize about heaven in the form of a library. I have done so myself. I assume that most people who believe in heaven want that heaven to provide them with the best of what they found in life, whether that be a reunion with loved ones, a prime fishing spot, beautiful music (those images of heavenly harps suggest this very thing) or whatever else it might be. If heaven doesn't give us what we most want, we may think, then what good is it?

One thing that heaven promises, whether it offers harps or books or fish, is eternity — not endless time but rather an end to time. And thus, to return to Calvino's question, there would be ample opportunity to read those classics. Or those best-sellers. Or all those mysteries and thrillers and romances we never found the time for. Then we could read them all over again.

And since it's heaven, maybe we would be able to listen to beautiful music and go fishing, as well. Any heaven we can imagine must have more than just books.

Artificial language

In his book Word Play, Peter Farb says that roughly 700 artificial languages have been created. None of them has ever caught on.

The most famous of these languages may be Esperanto, invented by a Polish physician in 1887. The idea was to simplify language so that people around the world could easily communicate with each other. Thousands of people have learned the language over the years, but not nearly enough. Esperanto speakers have found that the only time they can use it is with each other. When they come together, they can speak Esperanto, but when they go to a grocery store or to their jobs, they must revert to English, French or whatever language the people in their own community speaks.

Similarly a few Star Trek fans have learned the Klingon language (Klingonese), spoken by an alien race in movies and TV episodes, but have found that they can use it only with fellow fans who have also learned the language. Otherwise Klingonese is useless.

This is not altogether a negative thing. Just as slang is developed for use by insiders, not those outside the group, so an artificial language can serve this purpose. Those who speak the Klingon language probably enjoy being on the inside, even if they can't speak the language outside.

The problem with artificial languages is simply that they are artificial. Real languages develop naturally and very gradually over thousands of years. People who live in close proximity and must communicate on a regular basis speak in a way those around them will understand. We speak a language not because it is simple — most languages are not — but because we must use it to communicate with those we want to communicate with.

We may think it odd that the people of Germany, France, Spain, Italy and other European countries speak different languages even though, in today's world, they seem very near to each other. But for most of history, these cultures and languages developed separately. People didn't travel that much.

Many students learned French or Spanish in high school, yet soon forgot what they learned because they lacked the opportunity to use that language in the community where they lived. These are not artifical languages, but they might as well be in an area where there is little chance to use them.

A possessed father

Raising a teen-age daughter must be terrifying, especially for any father who remembers what teenage boys can be like.

Matt Haig explores this terror in his 2008 novel The Possession if Mr. Cave. Terrence Cave is a dealer in antiques whose wife was killed and then his son commits suicide early in this novel. And now Terrence must raise the boy's twin sister, Byrony, who is 15 and beautiful, by himself — or with the help of his mother-in-law, who always takes the side of the rebellious daughter.

As if this situation would not be intimidating enough for any committed father, Haig adds a complication, The title refers to "possession," and Terrance comes to believe he is possessed by the spirit of his son, who was always jealous of Byrony. Now, Terrance believes, Reuben is trying to harm her through him.

Increasingly the father becomes more desperate, especially as Byrony establishes a serious relationship with a boy judged unworthy of her.

Haig's novel begins with one tragedy, and every reader will know the story is moving headlong toward another one. For this reader, at least, just the initial situation was frightening enough.

Obsolete bookstores

We no longer need bookstores to buy books, even serious books. In fact, bookstores might well be an inefficient way to buy books in the twenty-first century, and it is certainly the case that we have become creatures of efficiency and convenience.

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

Keep in mind that the above lines were written by a bookstore manager, Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores. His career depends on bookstore sales, yet even he concedes bookstores have become unnecessary.

In today's world. where efficiency and convenience reign supreme, stores of almost every kind have become unnecessary. Some people even buy their cars online. Some people get Amazon deliveries of products almost daily. Grocery stores and restaurants will deliver food to your door. Pharmacies do the same, or you can use a drive-through so that you never have to actually enter the store. Many jobs you can do from home. Doctors no longer make house calls. Otherwise, you almost never have to leave home.

But our focus here is bookstores.

I rarely purchase books through Amazon, but two or three times a year I will order relatively rare books I cannot find elsewhere. More commonly I order books from the catalogs of Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller, a company that seems almost as obsolete as a bookstore. Hamilton has a website, but searching through thousands of book titles online can be oppressive. Their catalogs — several each month — are more fun to browse through. Some books are new, sold at discount. Others are remaindered, meaning they did not sell in bookstores and are now available at more extreme discounts.

Then you list the books you want, write a check and send the order form through the U.S. mail, all steps that seem somehow old-fashioned but yet work perfectly well, even though it can take weeks for delivery, not like an Amazon truck showing up in a day or two.

Yet I prefer shopping in bookstores, those few that remain. I like the atmosphere of a bookstore — shelves full of books, tables piled high with books, people who love books, like me, looking for treasures in print.

Just as many of us would rather hold an item of clothing in our hands, try it on and look at ourselves in a mirror before purchasing it, rather that ordering it online and perhaps having to send it back, many of book lovers prefer holding books in our hands. We like to read the cover, leaf through the pages and perhaps read a few lines before making a purchase. I have placed books back on at the shelf simply because I didn't like how they felt.

As long as there are people like us — people who prefer shopping and eating at an actual business, rather than doing everything online and never having a reason to leave home — these businesses will hang on, obsolete or not. Bookstores included.