Storytellersunplugged

by Justine Musk

The first book I ever bought was BLUBBER by Judy Blume. I was six. It cost me two dollars at the chain bookstore in the mall of my small Canadian hometown. My friend, Andrea Jackett, also six, bought the same paperback, and later that day or the next day I went over to her house and was surprised she had not finished it yet.

It would be years before I realized that not every kid had shelves filled with books – books they had actually read – in their bedrooms; with the staggering egotism of childhood, I simply assumed that because I read, everybody did; every kid collected books along with the toys and stuffed animals. When I was twelve, my family held a big garage sale, and I sold off most of my paperbacks. An adult gazed at me behind my table in our suburban driveway and said, with amazement, “You’ve read every single one of these?”

That was my first inkling that passionate, obsessive reading was a rarity among the adult world as well.

I remember a visit from another adult at a cottage my family rented one summer. I was in the process of writing my first ‘novel’, and this well-intentioned woman expressed concern that I was either out of my mind or being chained to the typewriter by my pleasant-seeming but secretly insane and abusive parents. “But you find this fun?” she kept demanding, sending aghast glances at my little while Olympia typewriter and the pages piling up beside it. “You enjoy this?” said in the much the same way as someone might ask, You enjoy chains, elaborate leather underwear and nipple clamps?

So I got the message: at least in the hockey-playing town of Peterborough, Ontario (go Petes!) I was an oddball. As my peers and I came up the grades, it became apparent that reading had damaged my brain, warped my vocabulary, turned my thought process into something flightily abstract, transformed me into a hermit who would hide in the aisles of the library so I could read in peace instead of suffering the tedious games and cruel politics of the playground. I remember my eighth grade teacher pounding angrily on the glass window as he glimpsed me in the library with my book, when the properly developmental thing to do, of course, was to be outside for an hour where I could be ostracized by my peers.

Books taught me many things. One of the most important life lessons I ever received was how to deal with a bully. Adults, including my parents, said, repeatedly, “Just ignore them,” which stands as the worst advice I’ve ever received (sorry Mom and Dad). But then a young-adult book by Ellen Conford taught me that if you stand up to a bully, he will stand down. I tried this in my own life and lo, it was like magic.

Books taught me about language. I absorbed words I rarely if ever heard in my daily life, which meant I developed the habit of mispronouncing many of them, a habit which dogged me well into university and which I have not entirely shed. I absorbed rules and constructions of grammar that I couldn’t explain if you made me but used in my own writing (developing a particular fondness for semi-colons, as you can see).

Books taught me the principles of storytelling. In the beginning I wrote for the same reason as other kids: the teacher made us. But my stories, while being three times the length as other kids (length was always a problem for me, hence the reason why I am now a published novelist with next to no short story credits), had a distinct beginning, middle and end, a narrative thread which held the attention of the other kids when I read my fictions aloud and soon granted me a certain kind of glory. When the teacher asked, “Who wants to share with us?” hands would raise and point to me and voices would chorus, “Get Justine to read! Justine, Justine!” The same kids who made fun of me outside (and often inside) the classroom adored me when I told them a story.

And finally, books taught me who I was. Although I’d been writing stories for years, I didn’t make the obvious connection until one late night in my parents’ living room as I sprawled on the couch and finished reading Stephen King’s MISERY. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time. The story gripped me, but what I remember most of all was the startling sense of recognition that swept over me when the protagonist struggled with or lost himself in his writing. (Poppy Z Brite has said more than once that MISERY is the best book on writing out there, and I am inclined to agree). Starting a novel, King wrote, was like “falling into a hole of white light.” I knew exactly what he meant. When the writing went well, it was like a hole opened up in the page and you fell through it and lost awareness of everything else. I knew exactly what that meant as well. When I came to the end of the novel around 2 am or so, I also arrived at a major truth of my own life. I wasn’t going to be a veterinarian or a lawyer or an actress, writing fiction as a kind of hobby. I was going to make fiction the centerpiece…because it already was.

I don’t think we decide to become writers. I think we simply admit that, through whatever genetic fluke of personality and obsession, this is what we already are, so we might as well deal with it. Some of us admit this much earlier than others, and find ourselves the luckier for it.

There’s a little girl I know, six years old going on seven, who wants to be left alone in the corner to read while the other kids chase each other around and interact in the way that pleases and reassures their parents. I asked this little girl’s mother, “Is she writing stories?” The mother shook her head no. “I have the feeling,” I told her, not without a certain sympathy, “it’s only a matter of time.”