4. Reading old words
When I was a kid, I'd start a new story every day and plan out the entire thing in my head. The next day, I'd have a new story to write, a new plot, a new ending, and I'd file away the old one because this one, today's story, was better. I never wrote down what happened to the people in my stories because what was the point? I knew how the tale went, where it died. It never occurred to me that I'd go back in ten years and read those two or three finished pages without knowing the endings I once designed in my head because those pages were all that was left of the story.
If someday there was a Hollywood-style apocalypse and some fiery meteors or whatever rained down from the sky and burned up all the books, it'd be infuriating to find just the first three pages of Pride and Prejudice or The Hunger Games. Even if you had faith that the ending was happy, you wouldn't know what form that happiness might take. You wouldn't know if Elizabeth found a man with a fortune or if she ran off with a poor man. You wouldn't know if Katniss won or cheated or lost and somehow recouped, and the first pages would have you believe she ended up with Gale because that's all of the story you'd ever read.
I feel like I missed a lot by not writing those endings. Like I never found out the end at all, because I forgot.
But even if I could only have the first three pages of Pride and Prejudice, I'd take them, and read them, and let myself be furious, because three pages are better than none.
Anything technologically advanced enough can look like magic but words are magic. I don't think the world as we know it could've been built without words, especially not written words. Imagine a classroom where everything you're taught is oral. The teacher makes tiny omissions, judges what to say and what to leave out. The smallest edits build up over time until entire encyclopedias are lost.
I think of words as small chisels chipping away at ignorance. People who write aren't always kind or deserving or even right, but they're always remembered. We build off the things we know in textbooks. That's how we get new textbooks. It's how we record ideas that develop into products that develop into antibiotics and law systems and Cochlear implants. Even something as simple as a note on Twitter, a post on Tumblr, can roll like Atlas' stone down a hill, gathering momentum, until someone else takes up the climb. No matter how many times the stone rolls back down, we don't stop climbing.
I find it hard to read non-fiction because I find it hard to write it. This was true when I was younger too, because my small diaries and journals would always start off well-intended and devolve into adventures involving dragons and swordfights that never actually happened. It's true that some people live better than any plot could devise but many plots devise better people than most who actually exist. I think it's a way of working through ourselves like each word is a shovelful on the dig to China. Maybe it's futile to keep digging but something dies when we stop.
Fictional characters are always in some way how we see ourselves, or how we want to see ourselves. That's why people dress up as Harry Potter for Halloween and own all of the collector's editions of the books. The most famous and well-loved fictional characters have the same virtues we want for ourselves, while acknowledging the flaws.
For this reason, I go back and I read what I wrote at ten and twelve and twenty. Even if the ending's lost, even if the words are fumbling and uncertain, I can always find that element of need in the first three pages.
“I
don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to
people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth” (Blanche).
