-Or Why I Will Never Be As Good A Writer As Markus Zusak –
-Or Storytelling, Part 2 –
– A Guided Tour Of Suffering –
To your left,
perhaps your right,
maybe even straight ahead,
you find a small black room.
In it sits a Jew.
He is scum.
He is starving.
He is afraid.
Please – try not to look away.
First, some context: The above quote is from Markus Zusak’s brilliant novel The Book Theif, which revolves around a little girl named Liesel Meminger. She lives with her foster parents in Germany, circa 1940 , and fosters a love for reading – a skill which she learns through reading stolen books with her foster father. Also, her family is hiding a Jew in their basement.
There are few words that adequately describe my love affair with this novel. It is quite simply one of the most beautifully written books I have ever had the pleasure of reading (and I am taking my good sweet time reading it.) I use this book for writing inspiration, but probably not in the way you think. I read this book and my self-esteem says:
“Wow. I suck at writing.”
And then I usually respond with:
“Yeah, I do. But I could be better. Let’s get writing!”
This may strike people as weird, but it’s the way I improve – I see someone working in my preferred medium, someone who is significantly better than I am in that medium, and I get this feeling that I need to improve. I need to, in some way, prove to that person that I can write amazing things, I just need to work at it a bit.
This is how I feel with Zusak’s writing. He wrote The Book Thief from the point of view of Death, but he makes Death world weary and haunted. Death takes you on the journey of Liesel’s life because it fascinated him, which, in turn, fascinates the reader. Death points out the horrors of the Holocaust without being heavy handed – in ‘A Guided Tour Of Suffering,’ he merely asks that you don’t look away. That statement resonated so much with me that I nearly cried; how many times do we witness suffering and look away?
Zusak’s writing is beautiful, resonant, relevant, and powerful. He makes his characters into real people – people that you care for – and tears at you with the terrible horrors in their lives. He can sting you with a line and soothe you with a paragraph, make you cry with the turn of a phrase. Zusak’s manages to capture all of the beauty and deformed depravity of the human condition in a way that makes me want to write like him.
I want to be able to influence people the way his writing has influenced me, and that is why I continue to write at midnight each night, because that is the only time I have to myself. It’s why I read my stories out loud to fix tense changes, why I struggle through writers block, why I even bother with the lofty dream of some day being published. I want my writing to matter to someone. I want my characters to come alive on the page, to have a reader make a connection with something that I have written.
These wishes feel very selfish as I write them, but I want to gift my stories to readers. I want readers to dissect, interpret, and attach meanings to my words that I never even imagined while writing them. I want to give people a story, so that they might find meaning in it. Markus Zusak and several other writers have given me the gift of inspiration, and I, in turn, want to give that gift to someone else.
The last line of The Book Thief:
“I am haunted by humans.”
I am haunted by stories, festering in my mind, clawing their way out. I am haunted by the words I want to say, and the stories those words tell. I am consumed by them.
April 5, 2012
Literary Superiority
emigee93 Children's Lit, Literary Elite, Literature, seriously, unsolicited opinions, what, Young Adult Lit Literature, Story Telling, Unsolicited Opinions 0 Comments
– Or Storytelling 4; Let the People Read What They Want (Emily Gets Ranty) –
‘The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.”’
-Joel Stein, New York Times “Room for Debate”
In his op-ed, “Adults Should Read Adult Books,” Joel Stein expresses his opinion that adults, unless reading them to a child, should not read books like Harry Potter, or The Hunger Games. These books were written ‘for children,’ and therefore have none of the complexity, depth of vocabulary, or thought provoking points that adult books have. And Stein knows this without having read The Hunger Games, and he vows “I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.”
This is the sort of argument that I hate, and it always seems to arise from authors, or English majors, or journalists – it’s the argument of Literary Superiority. It’s the argument that, because some 30 year old is reading Candide, he/she is superior (mentally?) to the 30 year old reading Harry Potter on the plane.
I’ve heard several variations on this argument, and every single time I am left with the position of “What?” I genuinely don’t understand where this argument comes from – I am usually just ecstatic to see people reading in general. I don’t understand why these “levels of acceptable books” exist.
I understand that, if an author is determined to write a book for 13-year-olds, its going to be vastly different from a book for 16-year-olds. It will have a different vocabulary, it will have different plots, but that does not mean that it is any less valid, any less thought provoking, any less relevant. Some are better than others (I’m not saying every piece of Young Adult fiction/Children’s fiction is a work of art) but you can’t lump them all together and say that they are less than adult books simply because of their genre.
There are several “kid’s” books part of literary cannon – The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland – these are all considered literature, and they are all stories written for children. Children’s stories and books, Young Adult books – the best ones often tackle deep, frankly adult issues. Childhood has the association of innocence, that we can’t teach them about death, illness, or the evils of the world. Therefore, books written for teenagers or children are lesser because they aren’t ‘adult.’
But the fact of the matter is, people like Joel Stein don’t read children’s/young adult books because of this ideal, and then think that the have a basis for an argument because “they’re written for innocents. Don’t read them because you’re not innocent.”
Joel Stein says: “Let’s have the decency to let tween girls have their own little world of vampires and child wizards and games you play when hungry.”
You’re not being decent; you sir, are being ignorant of the impact fantasy and reading can have on children, teens, and adults. If an adult wants to read The Hunger Games, let them read it. They are open minded enough to give it a chance – if you have a problem with it, please go bury your nose in your ‘real literature’ and leave us ‘children’ alone.