To-Do List

There cannot be a crisis next week.  My schedule is already full. –– Henry Kissinger

Music

I've often wished there were a soundtrack to my life that warned me of impending danger and harmonized with me on days I felt like singing.  Then I would know by the base tones and minor chords if I was about to answer a test question incorrectly or spill my coffee down my front.  I would "avenge" my homework to the movie theme and, while exercising, The Pirates of the Caribbean would blare.  Jaws would play when my sister snuck up behind me and BBC's Sherlock when I curled up to read.  And Anastasia's music box would send me to sleep.  And in rare moments, when I would just sit and breathe, all would be quite silent.

The Same

It is fun to be in the same decade with you. –– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Call Me Old-Fashioned

Handwritten letters are going out of style, and it's obvious why: typing is so much easier.  Your hand doesn't cramp, and your words are faster; erasing is irrelevant, just press delete and it's as if it never existed: no ghost of your mistake imprinted on the page.  What's more, emails and texts reach their recipients in minutes; letters could take days, or even weeks, so that the information is no longer fresh and the receiver is left behind.  Letters are old-fashioned, and maybe that's what attracts me to them: I've always been a fan of modernizing tradition, keeping it true to its roots but repurposing it for the desires of the new age.  While I understand the drawbacks to using a pencil over a keyboard, and (as you can see) tend to use the latter more myself, a word drawn by hand, in my opinion, has more character and integrity than a standardized font on a bone-white computer screen.  And now that typing has become the norm, written word carries all the more weight: the intended reader must mean something to the writer for him to take the time to cross all his own t's and dot his own i's.  In all, writing with your own hand is more personal than using technology to try and convey your thoughts: screens don't stain and crease, every letter matches every other one, and a part of you is removed from your message.  So, though I will admit I prefer typing for its convenience, it can never replace handwriting.

As Dreamers Do

I wonder how many wishes a star can give. –– Winnie the Pooh

A Child's World

I like to collect bits and bobs, storing them in old cookie tins and woven-wood baskets, so that on days I am alone I can entertain myself with endless treasure hunts.  My favorite discoveries are plastic maze toys from my former dentist's office, halloween keychains I never hooked to backpacks, dull crayons of ludicrously named shades: when I find these, I can be a child again.  At only seventeen, most would still consider me a child, but while I still have the luxury of being provided for and protected by others, my current world of e-textbooks and college essays is a far cry from the infinite hours of Sesame Street and sword fighting with Jack Sparrow figurines I occasionally long for.  I appreciate the powers and abilities I gain as I age, but my stored bits and bobs remind me to never forget the advantages of a child's world.

A Mere Moment

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke. –– Hermann Hesse

Another Girl

I've always wanted to be that girl that sneaks out her window at night to explore another world.

Then I realize I'm much more comfortable on my couch.

Curiosity

The important thing is not to stop questioning. –– Albert Einstein

So You Want to Be a Writer?

"So you want to be a writer kid?  Well, whoop-de-do.

I have been around the block before with blockheads just like you.

Each and every one a disappointment.

Pain for which there ain't no ointment.

So much for excuses

Though a kid of books is

Asking me to jump into the fray.

My answer is two words: okay"

Congratulations!  This is a momentous occasion: let me be the first to welcome you to the world of creative license, imaginary worlds, and writer's block--and therein lies the topic for this blog post.  So you want to be a writer: now what?  I faced this dilemma at a young age: in my childhood, I somewhat deludedly pictured myself a future veterinarian, until in-depth coverage of animal surgery turned me off (thanks Animal Planet); I quickly chose writing as a suitable replacement and was once again off to the races--yes!  I would be the greatest writer of all time!  No: in every and all time, to the end of time, in the universe!  Yes, that title would do.

I soon realized the job was not as easy as it first appeared: writing was not that image of a woman lounging on the front deck of her beach house with a computer on her lap and the palm fronds swooning overhead that I had always imagined.  No, it was a labor-intensive mental throw down of adjectives, nouns, and verbs all jockeying for position on the page, and what's worse was I didn't even know what my topic was [NOTE: always start with topic].  This didn't soothe the brawl as now I was attacked on all sides by a myriad of ideas, all of which seemed equally suitable.  What I have learned since is that finding a reasonably entertaining plot line (especially when only 10 years old) is relatively simple: the challenge comes with sticking by your original plan.  You see, as soon as I knew the topic, I had to map out the story--that was the fun part--but by the time I mapped out the conclusion, my idea lost its intrigue: who wants to write a story they already know the ending to?  So I tried mapping out all but the conclusion, and found I didn't understand why I had forced my characters into such absurd situations as make an interesting story.  With no knowledge of the end, I had no comprehension of the characters' motives.

Now I was faced with a new dilemma: I had an assortment of plots, none of which I was interested in pursuing to the end (and if I don't care how it ends, why should my reader?).  In the past few years, I've talked to various persons in the writing and publishing industry and gotten essentially the same advice: write about what you love and you will not lose interest.  Well, I love string cheese, but I wouldn't write a blog about it, let alone a novel.  More frustrating was that each new person I talked to told me the exact same thing, some even (somewhat audaciously, I would argue) tacking an "it's not so hard" on the end.  Well, crap, I must be doing it wrong.  Then an editor told me to write about what caught my eye in the moment.  Some of you will read that as a variation on "what I love," but it took on an entirely different meaning for me: no longer did I have to capture my lifelong passions on a page, nor figure out what they even were; I simply had to write about pop culture tv shows, my eclectic music tastes, my experimentation with typography--my little daily fascinations.  I wasn't trying to write what the reader wanted to hear any more, rather I was writing what I wanted to tell them: my quirky stories, my numerous faults, and my equally important virtues.  I could write about me.

I don't know how many of you this will inspire, if any, but that's okay because I inspired myself writing it.  Maybe I will write a blog about string cheese.

Where I'm Going

I'm an idealist.  I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way. –– Carl Sandburg

My Type

I've discovered a newfound love: typography.  I know, I know: what took me so long?  There are entire careers devoted to the study of letters, and my lightbulb took seventeen years to turn on?  It's sad, but true.  Now, though, I have a thorough admiration of the subject: the tones and voices that can be portrayed simply by changing the curve of your commas or putting tails on your t's.  It's remarkable the impact a font has on the way one perceives a piece of writing: forget judging a book by its cover, open a novel only to find the whole thing written in Comic Sans and I'm guessing more than one of you would jump ship before you'd even read the chapter title.  Some fonts are professional, some childish, others so mundane you don't even notice them.  This is partly due to the ways they are used in society: Arial is a default settings on many computers, and therefore almost invisible to the reader; Times New Roman is the preferred font for major essays and reports; and Crafty Girls…well, I suppose that one's self-explanatory.  But for me, Special Elite will always be tops: typewriter fonts make me think of dimly lit rooms with plush red curtains lining tall, rain-spattered windows, and gargantuan mahogany shelves laden with old tomes shadowing lush leather armchairs by a carved mantelpiece.  Typewriter lettering is classic, something young enough that I can reach for it but too old to ever touch its time.  It's what marks the pages of my Jane Austen and Charles Dickens books, what connects me to decades I wish I'd lived, what binds me.  And all this from the curve of its commas and the tails on its t's.

Passionately Curious

I have no special talent.  I am only passionately curious. –– Albert Einstein

Going Digital

I've never understood the newfound obsession with digital books.  How can a screen compare to tangible print in your hands?  There's something more personal about holding the weight of a book and pulling its corners to turn the pages.  I like imagining the millions of others perusing its pages even as I do.

 Even more precious is a book's aging: a computer doesn't yellow with time, its cover doesn't lose its color and tear at the edges, and so you can't know the book's full story.  I love old books for the knowledge that dozens, perhaps hundreds, have read it before me and felt the same things I am feeling: friends of mine separated from me by numerous years and dusty bookshelves.  And the smell, how can you experience a book without flipping its pages in front of your nose?  The scent of ink on worn paper is one of my favorite smells on earth.  You can't smell a computer (well, you can, but it doesn't smell like much).  Above all else, though, is the feel: running your fingers across the smooth cover, feeling the ridges of the title's letters, the fine grain of the paper and the prick of the corner as you hold it on the tip of your finger, itching to turn to the next page (as I read, I like to run my forefinger along the corners of all the pages I haven't read and fan them out repeatedly--just habit).  I love to bend the spine (I know that will kill some of you): it has to be far along enough in the book that it looks like I didn't stop reading on page 20, as proof that yes, I did read this book--my way of saying "MARGARET HAS BEEN HERE," if you will.

There are advantages to having an e-reader: easy access to new books without having to remove your butt from your couch or change out of your fuzzy pink pajama pants; the ability to carry dozens of books in one hand, and to search for particular phrases; the potential to change the font and size of the words, highlight them, or even define them (that's my favorite: I have dictionary.com on my iPhone, but always find I'm too lazy to type my four-digit passcode in every time I don't recognize a word) just by jabbing them with your finger.  But for me, the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages: many have said they are more easily distracted while reading from a screen than a hard copy; occasionally you have to stop to charge your book when its battery gets low; some research even suggests it's harder to remember what you've read on an e-reader than what you have in a physical copy (http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/14/do-e-books-impair-memory/); but really what gets to me is that you can't set a kindle all over your shelves in delicate heaps to impress passerby, or to admire when you're bored.  Honestly, digital books will just never have the same effect on me as a nicely bound hardback book.

Learned

I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know. –– Calvin & Hobbes

Impact

Sometimes, shorter messages have greater impact.

Enigmatic

Be obscure clearly.  –– E.B. White

Nothing But the Truth

The impressionability of the human mind fascinates me above all else: the idea that we can believe anything we choose, and it will become true to us.  It need not have a foundation in reality for it to become the truth: we do not have to see it or touch it to think it is there; thinking leads to believing, and believing naturally to knowing.  

When I say one of my favorite books is 1984 by George Orwell, people look at me funny, but it is for the above reason (and not the miserable, mind-controlling future Orwell imagined for us) that I love it: his grasp of humanity's capabilities as they could be.  He exaggerates what we know as possible just so far as it is still plausible and then elaborates until it becomes probable.  For those who have not read it, or do not know the premise, what I am referring to is this: the people in the world of 1984 self-police themselves.  There is no real Big Brother, or at least his existence is not proven, and yet because he is real in the minds of the citizens, he exists.  There is no system: each man is the government in and of himself, and if any chose to stop believing what he or she was told, no one could technically stop them.  But the population is trained to shut down their brains like computers if they begin to broach topics specified as off-limits (the whens, wheres, and whys).  As relationships between the three major nations [vacillate] between alliance and war, so do the textbooks so that the new alliances always existed, and the new wars have forever been waged: one day each man, woman, and child is convinced that they are at war with one nation, the next they are told it is the other, was always the other of the two, and as soon as they are told this they know it to be true--know it because they have taught themselves that it is so.  

My favorite principle by far in the novel is that of doublethink, which outlines the entire purpose of the novel, and of this blog post: that one person may believe two things, each of which disproves the other, to be true at the same time; they can know that an apple is red, can see that it is, and yet can tell themselves so many times that it is purple, teach themselves to know that it is purple, that the latter becomes just as true as the former, and they can push the true color of the fruit to the back of their mind until it is obscured by the knowledge that the apple is really and truly purple.

We teach ourselves to believe things every day: to believe in a God, or gods; to believe in science, in the definition of what we are and why; to believe our eyes and ears and mouths.  And yet, we each have a different take: every religion knows their god or gods are the only true ones; every scientist knows what he has discovered is correct until it is proven false, and then that which has proven it false becomes accepted.  Ask one man to name the color of an object and he will say it is blue, ask another and he will say it is red, and one will say the other is color blind, but how do you decide which?  Every individual's "truth" is based on their perception of the world around them, so what is true to one is not necessarily so to the next, and truth becomes an abstract concept, subjective to the person possessing it.

What is Excellent in Others

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. –– Voltaire

Quote-Happy

I often feel others are much better at expressing my sentiments than I am:

I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then –– Lewis Carroll

There are some thing so serious you have to laugh at them –– Niels Bohr

What fun is being cool if you can't wear a sombrero? –– Calvin and Hobbes

My thoughts exactly, Calvin.

I don't write to discover new ideas, I write to reinvent old ones.  I have littered my bedroom walls with other people's words not because I am incapable of finding my own, but because it is pointless to try to express what is already perfect any better.

The Hitherto Non-Existent

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious.  The cry "I could have thought of that" is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too. –– Douglas Adams

SH

One of my absolute favorite works is Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: his mastery of language, the complexity of the mysteries, the lifelike personages all contributed to my love.  And Sherlock was the best part: an unpredictable, egotistical, sometimes disdainful drug addict--our hero.  Now, all sleuths must have their defects--a perfect sleuth is not nearly as interesting as an imperfect one--but Sherlock was surely worse off than many.  Having described him above, you will have no trouble believing me when I say he wasn't very popular, and I think he thanked God for it (he's not exactly a "people person").  But when Watson came along, he clung to him: here was his audience, his swooning fan base come to admire the very dirt under his feet.  I'm hardly exaggerating: one reason I put the Holmes stories on hold was for Watson's incessant praise--yes, he's a friggin' genius, get over it.  Most of his praise, however, was warranted (if unnecessary--Sherlock's head was big enough to begin with): with what limited technology and means he might have had in the late 1800s, Holmes managed to solve even the most impossible murder cases.

And so, when I heard that my favorite 19th century detective was being modernized by BBC, I was outraged!  A show set in modern day London in which Watson could hold his own and Sherlock Holmes TEXTED?  The horror!  The injustice rendered my favorite detective, his eloquent ideologies compressed into the ungainly verse of txt spk.  But I had to watch it, to assess the damage, and…HOLY CRAP THIS SHOW IS AMAZING.  Sherlock was, if anything, more awkwardly unsocial and restless than before: he was almost juvenile when waiting for a case

and practically skipped to the crime scene when he found one.  But even better was Watson: no longer was he the love drunk groupie of a sidekick, he was actively involved in the crime solving, and actually saved Sherlock's ass a couple of times.  He kept his praise to a minimum, he got aggravated with Sherlock's childish antics, he treated Sherlock for what he was: not a genius, but a "high-functioning sociopath" (I did my research).   It wasn't just the great detective and his biographer any more: it was the dynamic duo of crime-solving whiz kids

So, while the original Sherlock Holmes is still my number one, Benedict Cumberbatch is a very close second.

It's All in Your Head

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real? –– Dumbledore (J.K. Rowling)

The Lowdown

I am often asked why do I write?  "Because it isn't there," says Thomas Berger; "to survive as individuals," says Don DeLillo.  Both excellent reasons, and both wrong: I do not write to either end.  I write because it IS there, but it is not there as I see it, not there in quite the right way, and I just want to tweak it, to say it with my own words so that maybe more people will understand it than before.  I write to communicate: I want others to feel the way I feel, to see what I see, just for a few minutes.  How many wish another would understand their pain, or joy, or fear?  How many want others to spend a day in their shoes?  How many act on those wishes?  I read because those words are the perspective of someone across the country, around the world, or no longer living--because they are a part of that writer; and I write so that others may read a part of me.  A book, to me, is a glimpse into the mind of another: a mile in that person's shoes, if you will.  And I want people to walk in my shoes--want them, for just a day, to know what it is to be me.  I do not want to force my readers to think as I do, rather I want them to be open to my opinions--to own them temporarily--and then give them back.

A Secret Gate

Still round the corner there may wait a new road or a secret gate. –– J.R.R. Tolkien

Wherefore Art Thou Poetry?

I'll be frank: I can write argumentative essays, hard-hitting exposés, dystopian fiction, creative nonfiction…but poetry eludes me.  I am expected to put my entire message, filled with emotional nuances and flourishing detail, into three stanzas?  But surely you jest.  I can hardly capture what I want to say in ten pages, let alone ten phrases.

Poetry requires more

than a skilled pen: you are changing the tone

by where you direct the reader's eye on the page,

creating a new feel by how

s t a c c a t o or how

fluid you make the spacing.

You

       can

    create

     drama

by

    forming

pictures

  with

the

words,

or theatrical

emphasis by how you arrange

each

sentence.

What I, as a prose writer, would explicitly state, a poet would shape and hint at through obscure imagery and subtle formatting.  This is why I hate it.  Not reading it, before any of you take offense: just writing it.  I need the ability to blurt out what I have to say: I cannot veil it with surreality--hell, the mere thought makes my head spin. Poets must tell entire novels--people's portraits, histories of nations--in only so much space as could be fit on both my forearms.  It takes more imagination than I possess.  And so, when I hear, as I have many times, that as a writer I am an artist, I must disagree.  A prose writer tells a story, one that appeals to the subconscious and rolls off the tongue as it is retold; a poet truly paints with words, and that, as a talent which I cannot fathom, I admire all the more.

Ink and Paper

Ink and Paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.  –– Terri Guillemets

To My Reader

Dear future authors and philosophers, chemists and biologists, doctors, astronomers, and politicians: this is a blog for you - or rather to you.  When I write, I am speaking to each of you one-on-one.  These are the thoughts in my head, and the eyes through which I see the world.  These are my arguments, my stories, my secrets.  And now they are yours.