A Tale to Tell

When I was a kid, I used to tell stories. My parents have audio tapes of me making up stories about a crow, never pausing before the words came tumbling out of me. I would create tales to keep father from getting bored when he was working about the house (poor dad). I wrote stories about lands I had never visited and using words I didn’t know how to spell. When I reached my teens, my brother used to tease me that all my stories involved someone dying. This was not so. Killing people was so uncouth. My fiction was simply dark and tragic. Just like I was convinced my life was.

This all stopped midway through high school. I went through a pretty serious depression and didn’t see the point in writing stories. I had piles of unfinished stories that went nowhere. I wasn’t interested in publishing them, so why bother creating more? My depression eased with time, but I had become serious about what I engaged in. It had to have a purpose if I was to devote time to it. It had to be for school or for work or to achieve some end game. If it didn’t have a useful goal, then it was too frivolous. After all, why waste energy on something that wouldn’t improve my life in some visible way? Why create just for myself?

This mindset lasted throughout my twenties. Slowly, slowly, I started seeing the value of doing things just because. Even so, it was hard to allow myself to have mindless fun. I had to judge it or try to fit it into some overarching plan. “I need to get in the habit of journaling. This will help me fix myself.”, “If I write for the joy of it, it will release my creativity which I can then harness and write something truly of value.” I couldn’t fool myself into it. In fact,it was only fairly recently that I found a tactic that worked for me. I wrote to make a practice of writing. Forming a good habit was reason enough and it stuck. But I still had a hard time justifying fiction.

Until two weeks ago. It started with a primal desire to read a novel. Not listen to an unabridged audiobook while I was also engaged in another activity, but to read a book I could touch, smell and turn the pages of. It had been awhile for me and it felt so good to be in an author’s grasp.

I don’t know what turned this enjoyment of reading into a need to create a story of my own, but I welcomed it. I started coming up with ideas. Unlike in the past, I didn’t get discouraged or bored in my thinking. And unlike in the past, I wrote them down and started thinking about how to flesh them out. Since then, my mind has been abuzz creating a story. What characters, what plot, what world. My story muscles are admittedly quite flabby. But, I’m working on firming them up. I have to say that this effort feels so good. Like I’m returning home. Or to my childhood. That’s reason enough for me.

I Care

Hurricane Irene headed our way on Saturday. Lucky, it was mostly a non-event in our area. There was some fuss around 2am but I slept through it and woke up Sunday to a fairly normal looking day. Business as usual, the gym and errands. At some point my mother left me a voicemail asking how I was. I called her back, “yes mom, I’m still alive, stop your worrying, I’ll be over later.” Sigh.

We were shopping later that day when she said something that has stuck with me. “You don’t show us you care,” she said. Thinking this was about not calling to check in on them after the hurricane, I protested that there was no evident cause for concern. “No,” she said, “this is about your attitude in general. You just don’t do the things that people do when they care.”

Again, my initial impulse was to argue. I visited every week. I made sure they knew I was alive every couple of days. They worry too much. They’d rather I be on a leash. They smother me. I wanted to tell her all this, as I usually do when I feel like she’s nagging, but something stopped me. Maybe it was the earthquake the week before or the near miss of a destructive hurricane, but I actually stopped the words from tumbling forward and thought about it.

I was no longer a teenager living in my parents’ house and fighting about curfew. I didn’t have anything to rebel against. I was a grown woman, with my own rules and a fairly full life. They know I love them. I tell them so. I give them hugs and say that they are the best parents in the world. But when I visit them or answer the phone, it is with the mindset that it is my duty to do so. Yes, I enjoy our interactions when we have them, but there is always this itch to get away. To get back to all the important stuff I had to do.

Important stuff. What is more important than the people who love us? What is it to show you care? I look at their actions. My mom will come over to walk my dog on her lunch break. My father, who is semi-retired, will often pick up packages for me while I’m out of town and put them in my apartment for when I get back. They ask about my life and are truly interested in the answers. They listen when I’ve had a hard day and just need to whine. They worry about me. They call to check up on me. They will do anything they’re able to see me happy.

I could look at this, feel the guilt of the ungrateful. Or I could pick up the phone and see how their day was.

Women's Write

I listened to an interview with a female author earlier today. The topic of readership came up and she said she noticed many a man pick up her book, see her name (clearly female), put the book down and walk away. On one instance, she decided to give one of these men a book of hers. She asked him to read it and let her know what he thought of it. He responded after the weekend and admitted he enjoyed it. She wasn’t bad for a female writer.

About an hour ago, I read that a fairly recent survey by The Center for the Study of Women in Film & Television that showed only 15% of television writers are female -- down from 29% last year. This, despite the fact that women make up a substantially larger piece of the television viewership pie. Strange.

This makes me sad. I don’t believe there are fewer female writers out there, but maybe that we are taken less seriously. We are bucketed to write and consume a certain type of media and only that type of media. This is a chick flick. This is chick lit. Yes, there is that type of media out there. But it has extrapolated itself to be our sole defining factor. We can only write, create, be interested in stereotypical “female” concepts. Romance and fashion being the highest on that list.

It annoys me to no end to go to an action movie and see an ill-fitting romantic plot line sewn clumsily in. Strictly to appeal to the female demographic that was surely brought to this movie by a male. Next week, she’ll make him go see a romantic comedy to make up for it. I am tired of romantic comedies. Why are these the only movies made to cater to our sex? Sure, I know many women that like them. Nothing wrong with that. But aren’t we a little bored by the constant recycling of the exact same plot? The same plot we read in romance novels, also created for us? Surely, we wouldn’t mind an original idea every once in awhile.

Personally, I cringe at chick-anything. It annoys me. I used to think that maybe I had some sort of cynical view of love. Maybe I didn’t believe I could fall in love again and this is why I didn’t want it in my fiction. Maybe I was born with a defective “chick” gene. The one that comes along with the defining X chromosome. But I don’t believe this. In fact, there are a handful of movies and books that really move the girly in me. Not one of them could be considered a formulaic pandering to my gender. They are simply good, well developed stories.

I am interested in many non-chick things because I’m more than two dimensional. As are the rest of the womankind. It would help to have more females in the media industry, writing and creating their original ideas. Not assigned to write an episode centered around today’s love triangle. Not taken on by a publisher only when she writes the next generic book in the ever popular romantic fantasy genre.

There are great women writers who have transgressed these lines. I’ve heard their voices and read their words. But they are relatively and we, as women and as writers, should aim to change that. Prove that we are more than fluffy chicks.