Change in Gears: My Critique of The Bone Season (Part 2)

I left off in the last post talking about the two different passages I found in both Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, and Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season. The reason I chose to compare Shannon's book to Hunger Games in the first place, is because the two have already been compared in articles I've read, and also because I found so many similarities between the two books when I read The Bone Season. For example, the setting, the round-up of the clairvoyants in a “reaping” style, and Paige engaging in illegal activities.

What I like so much about HG is precisely passages like the one I shared last week. Even amongst such a fast-paced story, such an action oriented plot, there are little golden nuggets like the one I chose, which alert the reader to the wider scope of the story. There is so much going on underneath the surface, and Collins brilliantly weaves that in to the action of the story. This passage is incredibly significant to the entire story for several reasons:

1. It is the turning point both in plot and character development. Before this, Katniss, while by no means supportive of the way things are in her world, accepts her situation simply as the way things are and chooses to focus her energy on not only her own survival, but also the survival of the people important to her. In this scene, after Rue (a 12-year-old girl with whom Katniss has formed an alliance) dies, Katniss’ attitude changes dramatically. Suddenly survival is no longer enough. This is where her rebellion begins, and her rebellion triggers the larger scale one that follows in the later books.

2. This passage is incredibly focused in the sense that it brings together all the major themes in the book. It touches on the dignity of human life and how appalling it is to have it denied in death. It touches on the illusion of individual powerlessness that oppressive regimes often create in the people they subjugate. On a smaller scale, the scene reveals the reason the Capitol has been so successful in subjugating the Districts: it has them too busy not only competing with each other, but also literally killing each other, to even think about banding together against the Capitol. This is probably my most favourite element of the scene – despite the fact that the boy from District One was the one to kill Rue, Katniss rightfully lays the blame not on him – who is just as much a victim of their ruthless world as Rue – but on the Capitol itself.

3. This scene not only expresses, but also celebrates an individual’s free will and power. This scene brings to life the saying, “one person can change the world,” because this is the moment when Katniss, at this point a very public figure, shows defiance for the first time, thereby making it acceptable for the Districts to do so. As Katniss firmly asserts, no matter how beaten down and powerless an individual becomes, there is something inherent in each person that can never be taken from them, something that cannot be reduced to a “piece” or a pawn in someone else’s plans. Katniss covering Rue in flowers as an impromptu kind of funeral is such a powerful scene precisely because the reader knows everyone in Panem is a witness to what she's done. She refuses to play the role the Capitol gives her by respecting Rue as an individual rather than a "piece in their Games."
 

All of that from a passage that is not even half a page long. I was hard pressed to find even a fraction of that in the second passage.

There are echoes of the same things – that is certainly obvious to me. Paige’s defiance in liking the yellow jacket and the way she takes pride in what is meant to be a symbol of shame within this new community in which she finds herself speaks to her individuality and free will. She refuses to be reduced to one thing or classified in simplistic terms – she stayed true to who she is. Katniss does the exact same thing. Paige further emphasizes this when she rejects the identity she has been given in this strange place: the number 40. She insists on maintaining the name she earned on the streets before she was captured: the Pale Dreamer. This name identifies her as several things in the voyant world, such as one of the Seven Seals (powerful voyants in the service of a mime-leader, which is the equivalent to a gang leader) as well as a rarity even among her own kind: a dreamwalker. I think there is something to be said for that – it is not without meaning. But it doesn’t drive the point home quite like Katniss does. It’s missing a certain urgency, immediacy and relevance with which Katniss’ passage is saturated. Paige’s passage barely alludes to the oppression she and others like her experience throughout the book. It doesn’t shed light on the cruelty the voyants experience at the hands of the Rephaim, who are supposedly saving the humans from the mess they got themselves into (even as I’m writing this, the similarities between the two books continue to blow my mind). What little introspection there is in this passage does not go very deep – she considers an uprising in passing and then discards it easily. Her focus remains on her own individual survival, despite the fact that she has resolved to take a stance against Nashira in a way that is not unlike Katniss’ antagonism towards President Snow in the later books. This passage, and Paige’s character for that matter, lack the impact, resonance, and sheer relevance that a comparable scene from Hunger Games achieves.

Now, is this necessarily a bad thing? No, it’s not. My personal preference for the Hunger Games is more than obvious here. Not all books will be, or should be, like the Hunger Games, even if I would love them to be. My chief frustration with the book lies not so much in the story itself at all, but rather on the hype the marketing of the book created. I feel like marketing staff these days throw around comparisons as it suits them, not caring whether or not they are actually accurate. It achieves the end goal, there is no doubt about that – I bought the book, and the marketing team made money off me. Hooray, good for them. But I find the way they did it despicable. Marketing strategies like these completely kill the value of good books and it transforms art into a commodity rather than art. It no longer matters whether something is good – and all standards to determine this fly out the window in the process – all that matters is that the book sells. And all you really need for that to happen is a cheap thrill (I’m thinking 50 Shades of Grey here) or an old and tired formula (such as a vampire love story).

I also think this is colossally unfair to a new, young writer like Samantha Shannon, whose book hadn’t even been released when she was being compared to J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins - both now firmly classics in the children/young adult genres. Once this comparison is made, her book will never be judged on its own terms, free of the shadows of older and far more experienced writers. She will always have to try her best to match or surpass these preceding stories without the writing or life experience they have behind them. I can’t help but wonder if I would have been as disappointed with the book if I hadn’t been hoping for the next big thing as I read it. Would I have loved it? I doubt it. If I’m being brutally honest, I find it just another book in the string of teenage stories that try and recycle the same things over and over again. But then again I might have enjoyed it a little more – not to mention I would have been less critical - without the indignation of it being held up to the same level as one of my favourite books.

What do I think of Samantha Shannon and her book removed from the context of her debut? I think she has potential. I think that at the heart of the story she has an original concept that gives her a lot of room to work with. Her writing is not the best I’ve ever seen, but experience will change that (hopefully). I would have done many things very differently (and I feel within my rights to critique because she is my age): setting, set-up, and villains just to name a few, but this is only the first of what is supposed to be a seven part series. For all I know what she’s got left up her sleeve will completely blow my mind. And at the end of the day, I can critique and condemn her book all I want, but she has managed to not only finish a novel, which is quite the accomplishment in itself, but also to catch the attention of one of the biggest publishing companies in the world. For the foreseeable future she will be living her dream of writing for a living. That is much more than I can say for myself.

Change in Gears: My Critique of the Bone Season (Part 1)

I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the summer. It was a nice change of pace since during the school year I’m doing so much heavy reading all the time, and I have to worry about remembering and understanding as much of it as I possibly can. Devouring book after book for no other reason than escapism was just what the doctor prescribed. All this reading turned me on to a few books that were interesting enough for me to want to critique. I’m thinking this will be the first in a few series of posts. Brace yourselves, because even I wasn’t anticipating how much I would have to say once I sat down to dissect why I liked or didn’t like certain books.

My dad turned me on to this new book, around which there seems to be a fair amount of hype. It’s called the Bone Season by a breakout author named Samantha Shannon, a 21-year-old Oxford graduate.  Here is the article he sent me: 

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/07/08/move_over_hunger_games_and_50_shades_of_grey_the_bone_season_is_here.html. 

She’s been signed to Bloomsbury Press, the same publishing company that brought us Harry Potter and they're already hailing her and her book as the next big thing. It’s already been compared to Harry Potter and Hunger Games. I’ll let the article fill you in on the rest of the details. Needless to say that after reading this, I was more than a little curious. This book caught my attention for two reasons: 1) J.K. Rowling was one of my heroes when I first decided I wanted to write. I even went so far as to tell my grade 8 teacher that one day I would be more famous (imagine my chagrin 8 years later), and 2) Samantha Shannon is basically in the same circumstances as me. She is the first big author on the book scene with which I actually have something in common.

So, when her book came out on August 20^th, I made a point of stopping by the bookstore to pick it up on my way home from work. The next night I was finished the book. What did I think? Did the book live up to everything that has been said about it? Truth is, I had a mixed reaction from start to finish, and here is why. (For those of you who still plan to read it, I give fair warning  - SPOILER ALERT).

The story falls under a category I call, for lack of a better term, a faux original. Strictly speaking, it’s true that no one has ever produced a story quite like this before. It takes a unique spin on clairvoyance. She has divided and categorized clairvoyants into a very well defined hierarchy of abilities, which outlines how powerful they are and exactly how they can affect other people and the world in general. She has also made them into a persecuted minority in her world. Regardless, all the other elements that come into play in the book, I have definitely seen before. The setting is in a future London in the year 2059, and it is in the grips of yet another totalitarian government interested above all in self-promoting propaganda. The writing style is eerily reminiscent of the Hunger Games, which would usually be high praise coming from me but in this case, I don’t mean it as a compliment. A friend once told me that she had a hard time reading the Hunger Games because the short sentences drove her mad. While I didn’t have the same experience reading Collins’ style, I finally understood what she meant when I stared reading the Bone Season. The sentences are too abrupt and they favour action over description or introspection a little too much. In my opinion, Collins’ managed a good balance between artful storytelling and fast paced action. Shannon, well, didn’t. To illustrate my point a little better, take these two passages:

“I can’t stop looking at Rue, smaller than ever, a baby animal curled up in a nest of netting.  I can’t bring myself to leave her like this. Past harm, but seemingly utterly defenceless. To hate the boy from District 1, who also appears so vulnerable in death, seems inadequate. It’s the Capitol I hate, for doing this to all of us….I want to do something right here, right now, to shame them, to make them accountable, to show the Capitol that whatever they do or force us to do there is a part of every tribute they can’t own. That Rue was more than just a piece in their Games. And so am I.” (Hunger Games 236-37)

                                                              ***********

“I went up to the upper floor and dressed in my new uniform: yellow tunic, yellow anchor on the gilet. A bright, sunshine yellow visible from a mile off. 40 the coward. 40 the quitter. In a way I liked it. It showed I’d gone against Nashira’s orders. I’d never wanted to be red.

            I went back to his chambers – slowly, thinking. I still didn’t know if I wanted to organize a prison break, but I did want to leave. I would need supplies for the journey home. Food, water. Weapons. Hadn’t he said the red flower could hurt them?...There must be guards stationed outside during the day, but I could slip past them. I had my ways. And no matter how Nashira Sargas had classified me, I was no yellow-jacket. I was the Pale Dreamer.

            It was time to show her.” (The Bone Season 330).

I don’t know about anyone else, but reading the second passage for the first time, I immediately saw the parallels. There is the oppressive force trying to break and use the voyants (short for clairvoyants) for their own purposes in a similar way the Capitol treats the tributes. There is the classification of voyants and tributes according to their abilities. Major themes in both are, first, the concern with appearances and, second, a preoccupation with spectacle. The biggest parallel, however, and the reason I chose these two passages to compare, is that both these scenes depict a certain moment in time where both protagonists harden their resolve and choose to make a stand against the forces that are exploiting, oppressing and manipulating them. This is when they decide to assert their individuality and autonomy. However, despite that similarity, the two passages read very differently, at least to me. Collins' passage is focused, precise, and right to the point. It conveys Katniss' anger, desperation and, above all, the cruelty of the circumstances into which she has been forced. Shannon's passage, in comparison, reads as much more disorganized and far less resolute. Paige is still undecided despite having faced similar atrocities as Katniss and, presumably, being pushed to the same kind of breaking point. Shannon gives Paige a world, a situation, and a history that gives her the potential to be every bit the relentless female lead that Katniss is, but - in my opinion - Paige falls short of that every single time.

I have very specific reasons for why Paige does not come close to being the same compelling heroine I find Katniss to be, but in the spirit of avoiding a novel sized post (of which I am not only entirely capable of doing, but also more than willing to do), I'm going to leave it here for today. Stay tuned for an upcoming explanation of why I chose to compare The Bone Season to Hunger Games in particular, and also an depth analysis of what the HG passages achieves and the BS passage does not - in true English nerd style, of course.

To Be Continued...

Rethinking Old Issues

Man, it’s really been a while. March and April are always such busy months that my head is always in a bit of a whirlwind and trying to write ANYTHING that isn’t school related is a futile activity. But now the stress is over, I have four months reasonably full of leisure time ahead so writing can go back to being a priority. The cherry on top would be for the weather to actually start behaving like spring. Which it actually seems to be doing now, fingers crossed. Oh, what simple dreams I have when I don’t have to worry about school. It’s kind of nice actually.

I haven’t entirely neglected blogging these past two months. I did try to write a post in between the mayhem of final assignment deadlines and studying for exams, but something about it just wouldn’t work for me. I was really struggling with it to the point where I just decided to completely give up on it. So, instead, I decided to inspect the shipwreck it turned into, and write about that.

I think there were two major contributing factors to why I was struggling to write that post. The first is that I think I chose a really complicated topic and tried to take a definitive stance on it. The second is that I seem to be going through a weird phase in my state of mind. Have you ever had a point where you start questioning absolutely EVERYTHING in your life? When you start wondering what the point is to everything you’ve been planning and working towards up until now? When you start wondering if you even want any of that anymore? That’s basically where my mind has been lately and it throws a lot of things up in the air. The topic I wanted to write about was, in a nutshell, what kind of writer I want to be. This is a question I’ve been kicking around in my head since I was 13 and decided that was what I wanted to do when I grew up. As I sat down to write, I thought – rather naively - that by now I had a relatively firm stance on it. But, as is often the case with me, once I did, what I thought I had all figured out started to unravel, and it did so very quickly. For a long time I’ve equated “good” writing with literary writing. I suppose it’s not all that surprising for an English major to have such a conviction – they kind of brainwash you into thinking that way. So, the way I saw it was that I had two options: either be a literary writer (and by extension “good”), or be a popular writer and be, well not so good I guess. But the problem with that for me was that a lot of the stories and the writing I consider to be good, and that have truly inspired me, aren’t always what people might consider to be literary. This was a big problem for me. It was a real conflict for me to think that what I felt a deep attachment to wasn’t considered quality work - at least in the respectable, literary sense - especially because I wanted to write similar things to what I like to read. So I guess I kind of created this binary for myself that resulted in me being unhappy with whatever choice I made. Writing that blogpost made me realize just how confused and undecided I still was about the topic. And this made me very anxious for a while. It was like living my Literary Theory class all over again and, believe me, that can be a bit of a nightmare.

So I decided to be a reasonable person and took a step back. And once I did, I realized that first of all, the use of the word “good” is problematic in itself, because that is such a subjective judgment. Literary is a little bit better because it has more defined parameters (sort of), but good is a matter of personal preference. And realizing that made me realize that I just have to focus on writing things that I consider to be good, to be worth reading, and to have some kind of merit to them. That way, I can figure out what I like to write and what seems to work for me as I go. The rest I suppose I can leave to other people to worry about. Which is not exactly easy for me – I seem to love to worry about things I don’t need to.

Something that gives me hope is the way I’ve been expanding my horizons lately. This last semester I took a course about the Canadian Short Story, mostly just to fulfill program requirements and not really because I was interested in it. But part of my reasoning in signing up for the course was that if I was going to be a writer I should at least have a good sense of different genres of writing - widen my understanding and expand my repertoire. Try things I may have prematurely written off and see how that impacted my writing. And it turned out to be a really good idea. While I didn’t like all the stories I read (actually I liked a very small number of them), there were some that really caught my attention and made me rethink my approach to my writing. The result? I’ve decided to try my hand at writing short stories for a while. Initially I rejected that idea because I’ve always been incapable of keeping a story short, whether it is one I’m writing for fun, one for school, or just a story I’m tell my friends or family. Somehow it always seems to turn into this long-winded and elaborate thing. So I guess I just decided that short stories weren’t my thing, sat down to write novels and that was that. But after taking that course and learning how short stories push the boundaries of genres in terms of their length and complexity, I decided that maybe I was capable of writing a short story after all. I just had to stop restricting myself. That was kind of a miraculous revelation in itself. I am definitely my own worst enemy.

Another miraculous revelation of sorts was that the short story is actually a perfect medium for an amateur writer. Something we discussed at length in my course was how short stories could exceed the stereotypes placed on them, the biggest one being that a short story has to be a certain length. Alice Munro in particular, it seems, doesn’t like this limitation. Seriously, her short stories are NOT short. But, still, a short story is contained enough that it allows for practice in continuity and completeness. By this I mean to say that a short story is almost like a snap shot of a larger story. You can choose how much detail you include, but nevertheless it captures just one piece of a bigger picture. And that means that it lends itself well to practicing opening stories, writing the middle to stories, and, most importantly, practicing endings. I’m a little notorious among my friends for enthusiastically starting writing projects, promptly losing momentum shortly after, and then never returning to them. This means I’m decent at writing interesting openings to stories, but pretty much untried at writing middles or endings. Short stories, I think, are a good way to kick this habit. Or, at least, that’s is what I hope will happen.

Interestingly enough a chance to put this new strategy to work is coming up fairly soon. My university is running a creative writing course next year and in order to get into the class I need to submit a portfolio by May 15. This means I have to kick into high gear pretty much immediately, so that should be interesting. I already have an idea in mind. I’m not entirely sure how it’ll survive the journey from my head onto the page, but I’ll have fun writing about the process here, so keep an eye out for that.

Eloquence and Melancholy

I’ve been put through the ringer in my personal life these last two weeks. Combine that with entering the whirlwind world of the Romantic poets in my British Literature class and I have to say, it’s gotten me into quite the contemplative mood. One of the highlights of my writing career so far (embarrassingly brief and rather uninteresting, I’m afraid) was when one of my high school teachers made an off hand comment one day in class that really stuck with me. She said, “Good writers don’t have happy lives.” I was indignant at first, and then a little insecure. Of course back then I was 16, knew very little about the big and scary “real world” and hadn’t yet learned to take what teachers say with a grain of salt. I wondered if “good writer” and “unhappy life” were inseparable. It was enough to shake me for a moment. I wanted to be a good writer, but who purposely sets out to have an unhappy life to achieve that end? This past week has been an introspective one, and I’ve been wondering – is there perhaps a grain of truth to that?

I’ve long been aware that I produce much more eloquent and evocative prose when I’m upset, lonely or just plain melancholic. If I had to describe it I would say that when I’m feeling down I sink into a different state of mind that has a heightened acuity for more striking language and insights. On any given day I have to struggle to get my writing wheels turning (which is normal – any writing guide will tell you that getting started is always the most difficult part), but when I’m upset, my mind is like this fountain of narrative that flows and flows endlessly. It sounds pretentious,  but I’ve honestly had those moments where I have to get up in the middle of the night to write something down because I just cannot bear to forget it. Or times when I feel like I’m not in control of the creative process but rather that it is in control of me. I used to think it was just moments of inspiration, but lately I’ve noticed that they always come in the middle of, or on the heels of some depressing mood.

Literature isn’t my only area of expertise. As a mildly dedicated Psychology student, I know some useful facts about the way emotions affect cognition. I know that depressed people are more realistic about their circumstances where as happy people tend to be overly optimistic. But realistic doesn’t necessarily translate to insightful or poetic.

Or does it?

I have a theory. We get lonely, depressed or melancholic for a reason. I think it’s safe to say that dissatisfaction is a big factor in triggering any of those moods. The major cause of my occasional melancholic moods is dissatisfaction with the way my life is going. Sometimes I think I don’t have enough friends. Sometimes I’ll worry that I’m not extraverted enough to take the risks that make life worth living (although I should point out this is a distinctively North American bias). Whatever it is that gets me down, there always seems to be a common denominator – I get overwhelmed from my reality and wish to take a step back, take a breather before I dive right back in. And I think the connection to the writing lies right there. Obviously, I can only speak for myself when I say that melancholy moods give way to intense introspection, but I don’t think I’d be wrong in saying that I’m not the only one. My melancholy is characterized by a certain desire to be a hermit – I don’t want to be out living life because at that particular moment it’s not bringing me any kind of satisfaction. If I’m not living it then I stand at a special vantage point that lets me view it from a more analytical and critical point of view, and this is where insight comes from. It doesn’t come from being so close to something that you can’t see all its parts – it comes from taking a step back to look at the whole picture and think about how each part connects to the other parts and how it contributes to the whole.

Isn’t that precisely what writing is about? If writers were out living life, they wouldn’t be writing about it. Writers are the ones that sit down and think about where we have come from and where we are going. They observe all the components to life and try to figure out what it all means. They make connections the rest of us don’t precisely because we don’t have the view they do. In order to do what they do, you have to stand at a distance.

So was my teacher right? I don’t think so. I think you can have a perfectly happy life and still be a good writer. I think that teacher saw a link between difficult lives and a heightened literary ability. But she missed the connection between those two – adversity leads to complex emotions and situations. Good writing comes from this, but it doesn’t mean that you have to have a difficult life in order have complex emotions or get into complicated situations. Or that adversity is a prerequisite for insight.

Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Almost Home Free

Greetings.

So unfortunately for all of you out there who sweetly tune in to see what I've got say this week, I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. I do think you're all very sweet for doing that so thank you. I can not even begin to describe the type of week I have had, with two midterms, a close reading and the knowledge of essay due dates slowly but steadily creeping closer. Needless to say, I'm all out of fresh and interesting things to say, at least for right now. Thankfully Reading Week is so close I can almost taste it and it will give me the long anticipated break I need to recharge my batteries.

That being said, I do have interesting things to share. I promised myself that I would update this blog weekly if I could so I'm trying to stick to that.

Here is an awesome link a very good and a very sweet friend of mine showed me lately and it's got really great advice on writing. Check it out: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/14/how-to-write-with-style-kurt-vonnegut/

Also, seeing as it is Valentine's Day today, and this is both writing and Valentine's Day related (not to mention incredibly amusing - to me at least), I thought I'd share it too. Here is what to expect when you make the crazy decision to date a writer: http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadawrites/2012/02/how-to-date-a-writer-heather-oneill.html.

I'd just like to throw my two cents in and say that while most of the things Heather O'Neill says are exaggerated to the point of hyperbole, they are nonetheless true for the most part. Hahaha.

Enjoy!

My Defense of English

I’ve been a bookworm all my life. Stories were my first friends and they’ve been my solace at various difficult points throughout my life. Adults have always praised my voracious love of reading, rare as it seems to be among my generation. People my age have, for the most part, never understood it. My punishment when I was growing up was the tragic confiscation of my treasured books because I liked to read to the point of neglecting the real world (gasp! So strange, I know). I’ve had books ripped out of my hands, thrown to the floor, and kicked down the hallway by guys who thought it was funny. A girl in my seventh grade class once had the gall to snap shut the open book on my lap and demand that I stop reading immediately.

I’ve gotten over these things, but as you can see, they still stick out vividly in my memory. Despite all the disapproval I’ve received from many of my peers, I’ve always been proud of my love of reading and all the benefits I’ve reaped from it; they’ve served me well all my life. But even now, with all the pettiness that was elementary school and later high school finally behind me, I still get the occasional wide-eyed, incredulous look when I tell people I’m specializing in English (which really should be called Literature). “You’re crazy,” they’ll tell me. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

Why indeed.

This is my defense of English and, as you might be able to guess, it’s been a long time coming.

Among the many complaints I’ve heard about English class, my favourite has to be, “the teacher is reading too much into this. I’ll bet the author didn’t mean half the things she’s saying.” Lately this sentiment has even been made into a humourous Facebook Venn diagram meme thing*, which, I’ll admit, I enjoyed. But people who complain about these things are missing the point. Here is your brief and vastly oversimplified crash course into reader-response literary theory: just because the author did not intend a particular interpretation of their work doesn’t mean that meaning isn’t there to be found, or that such an interpretation isn’t valid. You, my dear reader, bring your own meaning to each text and I, as a writer, have very limited control over what you will take from it, despite my best efforts. English is not about what authors mean or don’t mean to say. It’s about what the text itself means and the ways it uses language and so many other rhetorical and literary devices to convey that meaning. The author is important, yes. But language is a curious, slippery thing that makes it so that the author’s meaning is not the only one that exists or matters.

Another common criticism I’ve encountered (most often from my father) is that it is too subjective. You can say whatever you want and you have to be taken seriously. All you need to get a good grade is to be able to say it well. There is no way to be wrong. Sometimes I hear the inverse – no matter what you say, it is impossible to get a good mark. I can’t really deny the claim to subjectivity. Art is by its nature subjective, and the only defense that I have is that it wouldn’t be art otherwise. Any attempt to understand it on objective grounds would fail to truly appreciate it. Different people are going to read and understand things differently, so no, there is no right answer. But that doesn’t mean there is no point. What people don’t seem to understand is that in English you can’t actually say whatever you want and be taken seriously. You’re entitled to your opinion, sure, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to defend it. You have to provide evidence for why the text puts forth whatever you it is you claim it does. There is such a thing as a wrong reading: if there is no evidence for your claim then there is a very good chance there is something you did not understand.

To those of you out there that don’t understand why anyone would choose to torture themselves by studying this subject intensively for 4-5 years, let me tell you why I like English. Analyzing a text goes far beyond finding whatever it is a text is saying on the surface (although sometimes figuring that out can be difficult enough, cough-Chaucer-cough. Shudder.). It’s also about determining HOW the text says what it does, and how that presentation affects the meaning for the reader. Different contexts give words different meanings. The same sentence will take on a different implication entirely if you change the speaker. And believe it or not, language is not as precise as you may think it to be. Anytime you are deciphering a message - written or spoken - you are choosing from a wide array of different possible meanings, as well as implications and connotations. Language is fickle and fluid and anything but exact. Because of this, it is immensely satisfying for me to be able to delve into a text and pry loose subtle and significant meanings that weren’t immediately obvious, but still undeniably there. To me, the best professors are the ones who either point to something I thought I understood and make me see it in a new light, or those who make me fully appreciate a text I absolutely hated when I read it on my own.

I am a curious person by nature; I always want to know why. I always want to know why things are the way they are and how they work. English is like a puzzle, a mystery to be solved. You have many cues and hints, all of which you’re not sure how or if they fit together but you have to reason your way through it in order to uncover what the story is really saying beneath that surface level. It forces you to look past the obvious and discover the mechanics that are whirring away behind the scenes. It makes you gather the evidence and fit it into the scope of the bigger picture, and it isn’t until you do so that you will understand why literature matters.

Many people might disagree with me, but I think English (Literature) is important. People write for a reason, and it isn’t always petty, trivial, or intended to make money. We have classics for a reason – something about these stories resonates with us. The most brilliant explanation I’ve heard of why Arts in general matter came from Noah Richler, son of famous Canadian author Mordecai Richler. He said: “Novelists and storytellers - as well as painters, musicians, playwrights, poets, and architects - give form to the times and places that we occupy. They tell us about ourselves – and we have much to learn if we listen. The arts are not an indulgence.” This is exactly why I love to study stories. They are about people and how they go about living their lives. It is a removed perspective that features fictional characters that represent our society and ourselves; we can be critical about them, and by extension, ourselves. Socrates is supposed to have said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and I agree. I heard it said somewhere that writers live on the fringe of society and use this vantage point to observe the rest of us. I think we should listen to what they have to say.

Perhaps my favourite thing about English is that it understands that stories never dare tell you outright what they want you to know. Instead, they show you. They paint you a detailed picture and take you along for a ride. And when they are done showing you, they let you decide for yourself what it all means. If you’re someone who likes easy, clear-cut answers then English isn’t for you. As for me, I like the journey every bit as much as the destination, and this is why I can get lost in a book for hours on end. I’m not only interested in how the story ends, but how it gets to that ending and if it does it well. And I don’t mind how much thinking I might have to do along the way.

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* For those of you that don’t know, the Facebook meme thing I’m referring to said something along the lines of – sentence in the book: the curtains were blue. What my teacher thinks this means: The curtains represent the character’s isolation and depression. What the author meant: the curtains were fucking blue.

Why Am I Doing This?

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Ernest Hemingway

This quote has always resonated very strongly with me. Writing to me has always been the way in which I could express myself most honestly. Since I was little, I’ve taken to writing down the things I can’t say – and there seem to be so very many of those. I live inside a world of my creation and it isn’t always easy to come down from that cloud and accept what has always seemed the less appealing world around me. It’s always been very difficult to share that world with others and that’s part of the reason I started writing – there was so much there that I couldn’t hold it all inside. But even then, being the incredibly private person I am, I shied away from showing it to anyone, and still do. So, you may ask, what could possibly possess me to start a blog – a little corner of the Internet designed specifically to be seen by absolutely anyone and subject to all kinds of criticism? I don’t have an entirely clear-cut answer to that question. But I am willing to try and trace it out.

Even if I have trouble giving voice to the things that cross my mind, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have anything to say. Quite the contrary: in fact, lately I’ve taken to thinking that I have far too much to say and not enough people to say it to. And what better form of free expression is there than the Internet? It might not always be the friendliest place, but at least it provides an opportunity to put something out there and see what happens. I’ve known that I want to be a professional writer for a long time now. But there comes a point when that certainty just isn’t enough anymore – I have to know if the things that I have to say are worth writing down, if they’ll mean anything to anyone who reads them. Half the success of any writer is an avid and loyal audience. You can’t expect to make any kind of a difference if people don’t like what you write and, more importantly, if they’re not even willing to read it in the first place. Hence this little experiment. Are people interested in what I have to say? I guess I’ll find out.

In addition to that, lately I’ve been challenging myself more and more. As if that wasn’t surprising enough, I also found that I like it. So now I’m willing to push it another step further. My imagination and my rich inner world are the things that drive me to write in the first place, but if I’m not careful they will also be the things that hold me back. I cannot realistically expect to achieve my goal if I am afraid to let anyone see what I write. I’ve been told time and time again (mostly by my father who simply loves to bring me crashing back to reality) that as a writer you need a tough skin. And it’s true. Some of the best advice I’ve heard about writing is simply to write what you know. It seems glaringly obvious at first – how could you write what you don’t know? But once you sit down to write whatever it is you know it becomes much more difficult than just that. What you know isn’t always easy to get down in writing, for whatever reason that might be – inner demons, past experiences you’d rather not relive, thoughts you don’t want anyone else dissecting.  Writing is intriguing in the way it forces you to really delve inside your own mind, and sometimes find hidden pockets you didn’t know where there. But if you’re like me, you’ll find you don’t really have a choice – writing is a need rather than a hobby – so you’ll write those things down anyway. And once you’ve managed to get past all the reasons that would stop you from writing what you know, you have to face the added hurtle of showing it to someone else. Someone who does not live inside your head. Someone who doesn’t know all the misgivings you had putting all those thoughts or feelings out there for them to see. Someone who doesn’t know the incredibly personal space from which those words came.  In short, someone who has no idea what exactly it is they hold in their hands and such is free to judge, criticize, and condemn it as much as they like. It’s an incredibly scary thought, at least for me. I put a lot of thought and feeling into my words. I’m not exaggerating when I say that when someone rejects them, they reject me. In a lot of ways writing is not simply what I do; it’s who I am. But I also realize that if I’m serious about this, then I need a tougher skin. Here’s to building a tougher skin, layer by layer.

Lastly, the part of me that craves new experiences thrills at the thought of trying something new – and, what’s more, something with a slight risk to it. There is something so appealing about casting your thoughts out into the universe, without knowing where they will go or what waves, if any, they will make. Not to mention the creative freedom inherent in the very nature of a blog. Lately I’ve run into such a rut with my writing. Academic writing, while rigorous, can be so restricting, not to mention exhausting. I find that at the end of the day, when all I want to do is sit down and write about the things I want to, not have to, I simply don’t have the mental energy necessary. And trying your hand at a novel for the first time (somewhat naively and overly optimistically in my case) can be so overwhelming. There are so many little details that need to be in place before the writing can really flow. This gives me an opportunity to practice and to grow as a writer. And last but not least I’ll get to finally sit down and explore issues that are important to me. Writing is after all, a discovery. It’s the best way to find out exactly what you think about anything. And that’s the part that excites me the most.

I can’t really guarantee that you, dear reader, will always like what I have to write about. I can’t guarantee that it will entertain you, and I can’t guarantee that you’ll agree with it. But I do hope that it will at least make you think a little, maybe go places you hadn’t thought to go before. Maybe I’ll even catch your imagination, if I’m lucky. But I’d be happy if you simply joined me on this little adventure into the world of writing.