Becoming the Story
Page 8
her to read what she had written. The effort to record her breakfast or the temperature seemed hardly worthwhile, but she did it anyway.
Those broken attempts to put together the scattered pieces of her life somehow mattered. They mirrored a problem inside her that she wanted more than anything to fix, although looking at that reflection hurt more than anything, and she left each writing session feeling so drained, she could barely lift her feet to walk.
She tried to remember what she had once loved about stories. She remembered the fairy tales with their beautiful princesses and dashing suitors and the epic poems full of dauntless heroes. She remembered the tales of personal struggle and triumph, and she remembered Rita, and the day Maggie realized she could create her own stories rather than accept the ones she was given.
Her mind got hung up on that thought. Create her own stories. Although she was indoors, she felt a kind of wind blow through her. It chilled her spine and warmed her heart. She grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen.
She wrote. She wrote about an unattractive girl who had come along and got glowered at and loved to write stories; a girl who had been bullied and befriended bullied kids and made cookies for her dad. She wrote about a girl who wanted to write for a living and show everyone they had been wrong to glower at her.
She wrote about a girl who sent her stories to publishers who ignored her or said they were not drawn in or that her stories were self-indulgent.
She wrote about a girl who was so discouraged she gave up forever and lost the thing she most loved and lived out an unhappy, fragmented life where nothing she did, touched, or felt had any clear relationship to her.
She reread what she had written. She did not like the story. She did not like it, and she never would. She tore it up and began to write a new ending. It was harder this time.
She wondered if the girl in the story Margie was the right character to solve her problem, too passive, too prone to the stabs of rejection. Maggy thought maybe she needed to make some changes. Who was the right heroine for her story? What traits did the ideal and successful heroine possess?
She thought her character had to be dauntless like the heroes of the epic tales but still sensitive like the characters in stories about personal triumph. Maggie did not think she was dauntless; rather, she was easily hurt.
How could she become dauntless? What did dauntless girls eat for breakfast? What did they do with their time? She got out her notebook and wrote down all the questions, but she could not be sure about the answers. That girl did not exist yet.
So she went to her books about writing and read about what made a hero a hero. Usually, it was that they loved something beyond just themselves and were willing to go through hell to obtain or preserve it.
What did she love? She loved stories. What did she fear? She feared rejection.
She tried to imagine rejection as a monster, something with glassy eyes, drooling pea-green poison, a behemoth of an epic poem to be slaughtered. In her imagination it was prone to glowering.
She wished fear of rejection was not so intangible.i It would be much easier to deal with a real monster. You could go at it with a sword and when it was dead, it would be dead forever. She did not think that was true of fear.
She went back to love. That was easier. She had loved writing before writing had become about pleasing others and matching her work to fit editorial styles and tweaking her work based on what the “experts” were expecting.
All of that had hurt her love of writing, so that when the rejections came along, her love was not strong enough to counter the all the hurt and fear. The power of her writing was less her verbal skills than her love for it.
She returned to her notebook and found she could not write this story the way she did the others. This one was different. She was baffled.
She wrote plot outlines and character sketches. She tried to imagine what it looked like on the other side of fear. What did being a hero feel like? Were heroes really not afraid?
Or were they afraid but went ahead and did what they wanted anyway? She tried to imagine feeling fear and going ahead and doing what she wanted, but just imagining the fear was painful.
She remembered Rita, Rita who spent her life in a wheelchair, yet had met her face with grace and patience. Rita smiled a lot, but what must it have felt like underneath? Did she feel fear, inside? She must have, sometimes.
Maggie still did not know how to defeat an antagonist inside herself, but she wrote anyway, story after story, simulations of what it must feel like to win the battle with her fear of rejection.
However, there was an interruption. She received a call from the local hospital. Her father had been admitted after drinking himself into a coma. The nurse said he might not make it through the night. Suddenly, it no longer mattered that her father had hurt her.
She went to the hospital and sat by his side through the night, sitting in a hard, straight back chair that wobbled. Still comatose, he did not know she was there. In movies, she had seen scenes like this. In movies, the dying person would always wake to say good-bye. Meaningful words would be exchanged, and even if the person died the viewer would smile through her tears.
She sat and sat and waited for him to wake so they could have a magical moment of resolution, but he never stirred, and not an eyelid fluttered. Her mind was flooded with memories. He had not hated her always, she remembered. Once, when she was five, some music had begun to play on the stereo.
He had just gotten a raise and he took her by the hand and danced with her as she giggled. He had twirled her around and lifted her high and asked her what she wanted most in the world, anything – A boat? A mansion – he could afford it now.
But she did not answer, because at that moment she had everything she wanted: a dad who loved her. Unfortunately, he had lost his job soon afterward and strife had commenced. But now, sitting next to her father on the bedside, she could see what she had missed before.
He was not a fiend, just a broken man full of disappointments who had never gotten the success he wanted and who had lost his wife and drank himself into a coma.
She did not believe him anymore about the puppy. She could remember the light in his eyes that day when he had presented it to her. At that moment, at least, he had loved her. And now, beside him, she squeezed his hand and touched it to her cheek. His hand was cold. And she had a thought: I love you anyway.
She had lived her life in fear of being rejected by him, by anyone. And now none of it seemed to matter. She loved him. That was enough.
It was months before she continued her story about Margie. After the funeral it was hard to think of much else. But the urge to write never left her for long. Her dream of writing for a living still burned bright in the darkness.
She asked herself again: What does it look like on the other side of fear? Was it a place free of pain? Then it would have to be a place of death. Was it a place of relaxation? Then no courage was required. What did it look like? Her story alter ego, Margie, had to know.
Maggie set aside all the character sketches and plot outlines and simply began to write. She picked up where her story left off, with Margie being afraid of being rejected by publisher after publisher.
But Margie, the alter ego, did something that surprised Maggie. She wrote a story of her own. Margie wrote a story about a girl who had been rejected, and dealt with the pain by writing.
Like Maggie, Margie had gotten blocked and was separated from doing the thing she most loved in the world. And that word “love” was key. Because Margie loved writing, she could not write for publishers or squeeze herself into a narrow mold of their choosing.
Whether she ever got published or not, she would write for herself. Writing was a power too priceless for Margie to let anyone take it from her. Writing was how she dealt with life; it was her context; it was her story.
Margie continued to send her work to publishers and risk rejection, but she refused to compromise her own style and vision. Margie knew
that as a result, she would get rejected over and over but in the end Margie wanted more than anything to master writing. And writing well what she wanted to write was how she would succeed, and the only way she would accept.
Maggie now thought she knew what the other side of fear was. The other side of fear was love: love for writing, love for her father, love for anyone. Love was essential to true courage; maybe love was courage.
Maggie set down her pen, feeling satisfied. She was Margie. She knew what Margie knew. And like Margie, Maggie would ultimately succeed.
There would be many trials ahead, many mistakes, many faltering detours, but when in doubt, she would always return to her love for writing and the power it had given her from the early years of her life.
All her life she had heard stories. All her life, she had loved stories. Had written them and read them and lived them, until finally she had become a story.
She had finally become what she loved.
The Final Word
For most of my life, especially since college, I have kept journals. Most of my major life events since then have found their way into notebooks.
But I will have to omit the most major life event of all: death. This is unfair. I think I should be able to write a journal entry afterward saying what it is like and what I think of it, and if I learned anything. For obvious reasons, that is impossible. But there is