The Voices that Shaped My Own

“Decadent young woman. After the dance” by Raman Casas (1899)

As a thirteen-year-old beanstalk of a girl with a perpetual mop of frizzy curls, I often stayed up into the doldrums of the night, nestled beneath the sheets with a flashlight and a book. It was during these nights that my identity as a writer began to take shape. 

Book by book, I was unknowingly building a philosophy as to how and why I write today. At twenty-four, it’s no secret to my friends and family that I want to write books (an act that may sound thrilling and mysterious but is honestly more comparable to pulling teeth), and they always ask me the same question: “What kind of books do you want to write?”

Whenever I hear this question, I’m whooshed back in time to my thirteen-year-old self, squinting in the dim glow of a handheld flashlight and barely making out the words to Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Zusak’s was the first of three books to bury a seed in me, to lay a brick in the foundation of my identity as a writer, and here’s why. 

Rather than a traditional narrator, The Book Thief is narrated by Death, and it makes for a tragically beautiful, wildly entertaining perception of the story of life.

Huddled there beneath the sheets in the middle of the night, I realized something fundamental to the landscape of the written word: Writing can be lawless.

For the first time in my life, I saw how writing doesn’t have to follow the rules. It can be anything I want it to be. In fact, the “rules” of writing are nothing more than simple guidelines, mere stepping stones to get to where you want to go. Because, why would I spend my time deleting and rewriting sentences that start with a conjunction when I could be writing a story narrated by Death itself? A bomb had gone off in my brain; this is the peak of good writing. Writing that takes risks. Writing that refuses to conform.

One Hundred Years of Solitude author Gabriel Garcia Marquez once expounded on this idea, saying:

“A novelist can do anything he wants as long as he makes people believe in it.”

Neil Gaiman also spoke to the rules of writing (or lack thereof) when he said:

“The main rule of writing is if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like.”

This philosophy of lawless writing has been alive and well among successful communities of published authors for decades, but it was something no professor or curriculum ever taught me. It was only upon reading Death itself narrate a story about Life (“It kills me sometimes, how humans die”) that my imagination began to stretch its legs and run. 

I carried this idea with me, excited and liberated, until I met Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See in high school.

Now fifteen and slightly less of a beanstalk, I was craving a more satiating piece of literature, and Doerr’s novel was the perfect meal.

All The Light We Cannot See is a patchwork of seemingly unconnected characters who all cross paths in a firework finale of clarity. And it hit me: Writing can be chaotic. 

It can go in directions you never imagined. It has the freedom to be as nonlinear as it wants; a concept I’d never explored before Doerr. I watched as he showed me “story” can mean many things. Unlike a conventional narrative that diligently follows a character from point A to point B, Doerr gave meaning to a collection of fragmented scenes that, in the end, became one unified story. It was fantastic. I felt like I had burst through the door into some secret underground writing society. You mean to tell me this has been possible this whole time?

It is only when I closed All The Light We Cannot See that the story drew its first breath, and cemented in me this idea: I can do whatever I want on the page.

There is a push and pull to a story, a playful cadence, and it’s not always found in the ability to flow forth a seamless, linear narrative right from the beginning, but rather, the ability to take disconnected brushstrokes on opposite ends of a canvas and converge them in the center of the painting, right in the heart. Contrary to what I’d been taught in the classroom, I realized writing can be far from formulaic, and nothing appealed to me more. 

After devouring Doerr, I traveled onward, moving through life with newfound episodic gratitude, until I stumbled upon Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. 

This time, I was a freshman in college, where new ideas and experiences poured into me like a river feeding into the ocean.

At seventeen, I still possessed that same intense curiosity I had at thirteen, which drove me towards books that weren’t pop culture status quo. It was during one of my first college courses as an English major that I was introduced to The Bluest Eye. As one of the most tragically beautiful narratives our nation has ever seen on the subject of systematic racism, Morrison teaches this sentiment: Writing can be ugly. 

Forget poppies blushing in the springtime; Morrison writes with a two-edged blade that has dried blood still crusted on the handle. Her writing is real, raw, and massively invasive. It makes you shift uncomfortably in your seat. It has grit. Edge. It doesn’t ask for your permission. In the words of The Things They Carried author Tim O’Brien, fiction is for "getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.” On closing The Bluest Eye, my eyes were opened to how the act of writing is a confession in itself. It reveals the innermost parts of our being. It voices all the things we are too afraid to say.

Once asked about the art of writing, Ernest Hemingway stated:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.”

To write is to bleed. Any other way is an injustice to writer and reader alike. 

I hear this question, and I’m swept through a time warp of books beneath blankets and lightbulb discoveries about the dynamic art of story. It is because of this journey that to those who ask, I can offer up the only answer that makes sense to me: the most lawless, chaotic, ugliest novels you’ve ever read.