Allow me to step back in time half a decade or so, when a certain fear loomed large on the mind for those of us with a literary bent: the digitalization of the literary world. Bookstores were following the path of their video rental store brethren and being gutted to make way for Nordstrom Racks and mega-gyms. E-readers increasingly topped Christmas lists. Blogs were no longer the clunky, poorly designed online diaries of the early 2000s, but aesthetically pleasing, specialized platforms with scores of followers. Amazon was hailed as the savior of the book industry. The general population was reading again!

If you happen to be one of those who opened a brand new Kindle on Christmas morning, you’re aware of the massive battle that’s been underway, for years now, between publishers and the makers of e-readers like Amazon and Apple. You may have received three lovely, unexpected dollars as the result of a lawsuit settlement between Amazon and Hachette or some other tech giant/publisher dispute. The gist of it was that Amazon was selling e-books for far less than hardcovers, and the publishers’ primary tasks–getting physical books to bookstores and setting their own, rather high, prices–became obsolete, so the publishing houses were losing lots and lots of money. The full story is very complex and better handled by a more knowledgeable writer (you can read more about it in Keith Gessen’s “The War of the Worlds” in the most recent issue of Vanity Fair). I’d rather talk about a digitalization issue far more symbolic, possibly far less significant, and much closer to my heart.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re a book lover. And as a book lover, you likely own many well-worn, well-thumbed hard copies of your favorite books that have been read dozens of times over. Perhaps you’re an annotator or like to jump around when reading. Maybe you just can’t get enough of that new book smell. If so, you were likely outraged when the e-reader trend caught on.

But bear with me. I was one of you once. I refused to get a Kindle; it took away the entire soul of the act of reading. I scoffed at people who brought their iPads to the pool, who all seemed like they were reading exclusively things like Fifty Shades of Gray and Chelsea Handler’s new book. You don’t get the new book smell, you can’t annotate (let’s face it, the “pen” function on the iPad is an anti-dexterous joke), and flipping back and forth is so much more difficult than holding your place with your thumb that’s just not worth it. Additionally, crucially, books don’t have to be recharged, and in fact will survive most physical affronts save a fire, unlike their electronic equivalents.

I will still never throw out my old Count of Monte Cristo copy or the Pride and Prejudice my grandfather gave me, but I’ve learned to appreciate their digital counterparts as well. The average paperback weighs almost a pound. As a college student who travels a lot, it’s simply not feasible for me to carry physical books with me on trips. Owning a Kindle means I always have an entire library at my fingertips, and in fact I think it’s led me to read more new books and better acquaint myself with familiar ones because of the lack of physical limitations. And isn’t that the heart of the matter for us literary-minded folk? As long as people are interacting with, learning from, and generally bettering their lives from the material, is the vehicle so important in the long run? The words are what really matter, no matter how they’re printed–right?

To take the issue to even closer to home, Shenandoah itself, along with a host of other literary magazines, switched from hardcover to online fairly recently. This has complicated matters of layout and aesthetics, elements that can be critical to the essence of a literary journal. And of course, like with the publishers vs. Amazon debacle, there are financial matters to consider. But it certainly does make the magazine more accessible, more visible to the fair-weather reader who may now be more likely to become a committed reader because of the greater ease of accessibility.

I know this is an old debate, but it seems to me it might be interesting to check back in now that the dust has settled and see if any of the die-hard traditionalists have changed their minds. So, readers–has digitalization in fact taken away the “soul” of the literary world, or does the sacrifice of being able to physically handle the words make them that much stronger and far-reaching? How best can publishers, authors, editors, and readers maintain the personal connection felt with a beloved copy of a favorite book with its digital equivalent?

Death of the author. By now a familiar concept, thank you Barthes, and incredibly useful in interpreting a text. It’s freeing for both the reader and the writer, opening up works for interpretations that their authors never would have considered. The writer’s intentions don’t matter; the text speaks for itself. However, there are a few works where the authorial presence is so strong that divorcing the text from the author is almost impossible.

Namely, I’m talking about Victor Hugo and Les Miserables. It’s one of the longest books ever written, totaling 1500 pages in English and even more in French, and more than a quarter of the book is made up not of plot, but authorial digressions. Hugo is notorious for his tangents in Les Mis. He’ll put the story on hold and talk about Waterloo for fifteen chapters, then the lifestyle of a specific Parisian convent, and for me most egregious of all, the history and design of the Parisian sewer system. Even at the beginning of the book, before Hugo even introduces his main character Jean Valjean, he writes, “Although these details in no way essentially concern that which we have to tell…” and proceeds to devote several chapters to the background of the bishop that Valjean meets, including the layout of his house.

Hugo’s intentions in writing this novel don’t need to be speculated; he states them clearly within the text. He’s attempting to address social injustice above all, and in introducing Les Miserables, he says, “So long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.” Several times he pauses in the narrative to discuss the horrible lot in life of the poor – how society leads men like Jean Valjean to commit crime and the punishment is so severe that it turns him into a hardened criminal. While many novels attempting to make a similar statement would simply present the narrative and let the reader draw the natural conclusion, Hugo stops the narrative and explains it to the reader. There’s very little room for misinterpretation in Les Miserables – Hugo lets you know what he’s trying to do as an author all the time.

What audacity. Les Miserables is considered one of the greatest novels of its time, so how did Hugo get away with this? One of his biographers explains, “The digressions of genius are easily pardoned.” True, Hugo is a great writer, and Les Miserables has an epic scope, discoursing on French history, the architecture of Paris, politics, philosophy, the nature of justice, religious, love… Hugo has an incredibly informed and eloquent opinion on all of it, and he’s going to explain it to you at length.

Only in one other book have I encountered such a strong authorial presence within the text, one of the earliest novels ever written, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. The newness of the category explains Fielding’s unconventionality, at least. Like Les Miserables it’s an incredibly long book (both could be effectively wielded as a blunt weapon), and it has its share of social commentary as well, although Fielding goes for satire, exposing with comedy what Hugo does with tragedy. Fielding has the same authorial interruptions, but his are more organized; Tom Jones is divided into 18 books (like I said, long), and each book begins with a chapter where Fielding speaks directly to the reader. They’re not always unrelated to the plot, sometimes he makes analytical comments about specific characters, but he’s just as likely to start ripping into bad writers, and particularly, bad critics.

I love both Les Miserables and Tom Jones, and I think the authorial presence within them works well. Hugo may digress, but he writes with such knowledge, intelligence, compassion, and beauty that it only makes the work greater. Fielding’s notes to the reader make a long book even longer, but I was charmed by them. I felt like I was entering into a conversation with the author, and when the book ended, I felt the loss.

What I’m wondering is if any writer today could pull of this same kind of intrusive yet welcome authorial presence in a work of fiction. Generally we want authors to get out of the way of their writing, and I can’t see any attempts at interrupting the story for a personal digression making it past the editors. That’s why the non-fiction genre is there. What’s more, Les Miserables and Tom Jones were hugely popular when they came out. It’s hard to imagine any novel so long being widely popular outside of literary circles today, even without the additional eccentricities. Could a contemporary author accomplish this style, assuming their work had a similar epic scope and social commentary? Is there a particular author you’d want to write a book like that? Or is Les Miserables simply a period piece, undoubtedly great but unable to be repeated?

How does Jean Valjean take his coffee? Does Dante prefer cappuccino to a macchiato? These are the questions that keep me up night, and thanks to Literary Starbucks, I can finally find my answers.

“Drinks are Up for Your Favorite Authors and Characters,” reads the site’s tagline. Spinning off the popularity of coffee house culture in the modern literary scene, this blog re-imagines some of literature’s greatest figures and places them in the context of a modern day Starbucks. Three college students came up with the idea this September, and describe the impetus for the project on their website. “One day we thought, what would all of history’s famous authors and characters order if they lived in modern times and went to Starbucks? The rest is history.”

The blog quickly garnered positive response, with floods of new readers making requests for their own literary favorites. Authors from Milton to J.K. Rowling have had their turn with the Literary Starbucks barista. In the month and a half since it’s inception, the blog has received attention from various media outlets, and just recently reached 25,000 followers.

The popularity of Literary Starbucks makes me wonder what it is about anachronism that draws people in. An anachronism, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is anything that exists out of its proper context of time. In many cases, it’s an error on behalf of the author. This definition doesn’t account for intentional anachronism, and the comical juxtaposition that so appeals to the modern reader. There’s something compelling about seeing the canon of the past clash with the present.

The popularity of literary reboots and remixes can attest to this: just take a look at the success of Seth Grahame-Smith’s zombified Regency Era in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Mallory Ortberg’s new Texts from Jane Eyre and Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters. Grahame-Smith’s proper English zombies have become so popular that a film adaptation is in the works, and they will be shuffling to big screens in sometime in 2015. Meanwhile, Ortberg’s new book is sure to draw flocks of new readers to her website, The Toast, where she habitually juxtaposes the old and new with a charming irreverence. Ortberg cites Scarlett O’Hara with a cell phone as the inspiration for her book, but no literary or historical figure is immune to her anachronistic gaze.

The popularity of anachronism isn’t so much a literary phenomena as much as it is a cultural one. The creators of this media will admit that their success comes at least in part from the gimmick. Still, it’s interesting to consider why the gimmick works. (Maybe in this modern age, readers have become so desensitized to the accessibility of media that long-beloved characters no longer evoke any sympathy or understanding. Maybe readers have become cynical and lazy, and this recycling of media signals the death knell for literature.) Of course it doesn’t. This has been going on for centuries. Shakespeare’s Roman plays were performed in modern Elizabethan/Jacobean dress, for example, and I won’t even attempt to navigate the rabbit hole that is anachronism in Renaissance art. Even in cases of accidental anachronism, the inclusion of contemporary details forged a connection with the audience which might not have existed otherwie.

Anachronism might even inspire otherwise uninterested readers to take a second look at a classic. I remember feeling mostly apathetic toward Shakespeare during high school, until I discovered Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 “Romeo + Juliet.” Perhaps it was the late 90’s aesthetic, or the gun-swords, or Leonardo DiCaprio, but something about this adaptation clicked with me. When Abraham asked, “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” I found myself actually caring about the answer. After that, whenever I struggled to connect with one of Shakespeare’s characters, I could try to imagine them in a modern context, and that would give me an angle into the play.

Intentionally anachronistic works aren’t going to win prizes for originality any time soon, but they still occupy a worthwhile niche in the literary market. At worst, they’re gimmicks, but at their best, they can be gateways. Our fondness for blending past and present is a good sign. It means we’re still curious and constantly looking for new ways to process literature, and to find reflections of ourselves in the classics. If that means Milton starts ordering Frappuccino from Starbucks, so be it.

Do you think that modern adaptations have value that cannot be achieved by the original version? Have you ever connected with a modern adaptation? Is intentional anachronism valuable, or is it the junk food of the literary world?

 

 

 

Several recent bloggers have raised the question, “Why do we write?” I want to respond to that question. Mainly, I think we write because it’s therapeutic and exhilarating. Also, as humans we desire communication with those around us. But I’m also interested in something else. Not only why we write (Step 1), but also why does it matter (Step 2)? What’s the point? Does it change anything about who we are or the world we live in?

Step 1: Storytelling can be empowering for the writer, a form of self-expression, or a way of figuring out the truth. When a story is told, it can initiate change in a community or improve communication about a life experience. Stories have immense power in communities, connecting people to things they may not hear or see on their own. Stories, ultimately, can be archived for future generations and communities. We write because stories can find a way to truth or understanding, raise difficult questions, and spread awareness about experiences.

Step 2: Does the act of storytelling matter? What’s the point? Our whole society revolves around the written and spoken word: the building blocks of storytelling. We go to extensive effort to teach children how to read and write. I am going to be an English teacher next year. How can I explain to my students that storytelling really does matter?

I have recently been thinking about the power of storytelling because of a project I am working on called The Facing Sexual Violence Project, but first I am reminded of a TED talk that discusses the danger of a single story. Chimamanda Adichie, a lover of stories and a storyteller herself, speaks on why it is important for stories to provide multiple perspectives of life. There should not be one story, but many. According to Adichie, “The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.” Without a variety of stories, Adichie argues that we fall into the trap of believing what she calls “a single story”, a limited understanding of whatever it is we tell stories about.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en#t-4699

Multiple stories, however, give individuals and communities a chance to think about things in a new way. Individuals who truly listen to multiple stories open up their minds. They begin to think for themselves, considering the perspectives they encounter in stories and developing ideas about how to move something in the world.

Adichie talks of stories as if they have volcanic power. She says, “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” Adichie’s TED talk inspired me because I also believe in the power of storytelling, which brings me to The Facing Sexual Violence Project, the inspiration that charges electricity through my fingers as I type this blog.

Why do I write and read stories?

Because I want these stories to change the world, advocate for social justice, entertain a young girl or a busy parent.

The Facing Project (http://facingproject.com/) is a national non-profit organization that works with communities to connect through storytelling over a particular challenge or social issue. Facing matches community members who wish to anonymously (or not, if desired) tell their stories about the issue at hand and ultimately publishes them in a book or in some other expressive form. The Facing Project has reached communities dealing with poverty, human trafficking, and many more.

So, what’s our issue?

Sexual violence in Rockbridge County.

W&L student Noelle Rutland brought The Facing Sexual Violence project to Rockbridge County. Storytelling, it seemed, would be the best way for the community to speak for itself. Why does storytelling matter? To me, it matters because it inspires things like The Facing Project. Storytelling propels individuals to share something and it gives communities opportunities to communicate with each other.

As the project grows, I am lucky to participate as Noelle’s co-manager, and I am inspired by the stories we have received so far. Washington & Lee Professor Deborah Miranda shared an excerpt from her story, Silver, with our project that illuminates the importance of storytelling.

W&L Professor Deborah Miranda (Blog: http://www.badndns.blogspot.com/)

For years, Professor Miranda kept her story silent. She confessed, “Most of all, I can’t tell because there is nobody who wants to hear…My husband asks what’s wrong. I don’t have the words to tell him. He doesn’t really want to know.”

Silence.

For anyone who has a story to share, silence can be petrifying. The longer you are silent, the more you convince yourself that your story should not be spoken aloud. If you speak it aloud you may disrupt the peace, you may upset someone, and you will certainly make yourself more vulnerable.

Storytelling defies silence…

It yells doggedly at the settled earth and the status quo:

“LISTEN. I have something to say. I cannot keep this inside of me any longer. I have a story. We all have a story.”

Miranda says,

“I write this story by waking up each morning and writing until I feel myself begin to change the truth. Then I walk away from the work till I can face reality again…I walk away from this story for nearly a decade; walk away with its false ending: the warm old house, the husband, the fiction of a healing that doesn’t cost, but doesn’t transform. I fight transformation tooth and nail. At last, I recognize change as my old friend, Truth. I stand still, and embrace her.”

Professor Miranda’s story shook me in the best way – like when you’ve overslept and your benevolent roommate wakes you abruptly so that you’re not late to class – it pulled me out of my dream-like state into the world urgently awaiting these stories. We have to face them.

(Quotes from Miranda excerpted from: Silver, by Deborah A. Miranda. First printed in Bad Girls/Good Girls: Women, Sex and Power in the Nineties. edited by Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry, Editors, Rutgers University Press, 1998.)

Sometimes I find myself dispirited, unsatisfied with my writing and wondering whether I should waste my time with it at all. It is not likely that it will ever find its way into the public eye, and even less so that it will have any sort of effect on the world. After all, there are thousands upon thousands of other would-be novelists and poets out there. The practice of writing becomes a rather egotistical undertaking when one considers the multitudes of hopeful writers there are. What right do I have to assume that I have something more important to say than they?

The answer, of course, is none. I am fully aware of this, but I continue to write; this leads me to wonder what my real motivation is for writing. Seeing as I have already given up on changing the world with my work, I can assume that it is a more selfish, personal reason. This could be any number of things: to express myself, to communicate my ideas, for the simple joy of stringing together words on a page.

George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” details what the author asserts to be his motivations for setting pen to paper. First, Orwell explains to his reader that he has had a penchant for writing since he was practically a toddler. He admits that he was a lonely child, and that writing came as a kind of remedy to his loneliness. Orwell was constantly composing stories in his head, as he puts it: “I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind.” This is certainly familiar to me, and I’m sure to many who feel the need to write. I remember being a small child, bored at a restaurant and one of the only children in a room full of adults. A waitress bent down and asked me cheerfully what my name was. “Emma, said Emma,” I quickly replied, accidentally vocalizing the story I’d been internally writing.

Orwell says, “I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside.” But, he does not proclaim this habit to be his reason for writing. Instead, he gives his audience a list of much more mature, rational motives. These were formulated after he had completed his lonely childhood and are as follows:

1. Sheer egoism.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
3. Historical impulse.
4. Political purpose.

These are all very fair and seem to cover most of the reasons for writing that I can imagine. Indeed, Orwell asserts that every writer embraces these objectives to some extent.

However, I am not entirely satisfied with them because they are altogether too logical. What Orwell describes as “a kind of compulsion from outside,” and what I feel as a need to write despite all sense telling me not to, cannot be explained by such a rational list of aims. I believe Orwell recognizes this as well; he writes:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Clearly there is something else, some indefatigable impulse that forces us to write, and write again.

Here I have brought myself to a familiar topic. It is often said that true writers have to write. In her book The Midnight Disease, Alice W. Flaherty examines this idea from a neurological standpoint. She writes about several reasons why a person’s brain might feel the need to write. In most extreme cases, a writer may have hypergraphia, which is increased motivation to write caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. According to Flaherty, the author Fyodor Dostoevsky is believed by some to have been hypergraphic, as evidenced by his “spells of altered consciousness, his mood swings and their free-floating feeling of doom and ecstasy, his religious and philosophical temperament, his altered sexuality, and his overpowering desire to write.”

Of course, it isn’t as if all writers are affected by this extreme condition; Flaherty offers other explanation for those who might not be affected by hypergraphia but feel the need to write. She asserts that many writers, and specifically amateur ones, “are suffering from something: bereavement, illness, exile, ‘narcissistic injury’ to self-esteem, adolescence.” This suffering can trigger “limbic system and temporal lobe activity through their roles in emotion [and] increases the desire to write and communicate.”

This would perhaps explain Orwell’s need to write from a young age; his self-described loneliness could certainly be seen as injury in his adolescence. It might be the cause of his mystery compulsion and my steadfast, illogical desire to write. It might be a hard concept to accept− that my writing is more chemical reaction than noble purpose. On the other hand, it is rather amazing to think that authors such as Dostoevsky and Orwell not only wanted to write, but were compelled to by their own brains as if by an outside force. It lends their stories an element of inevitability and fate.

What do you think? Why do you write?

Check out Elise Petracca’s “Why We Write” below! It deals with a similar topic and might be interesting to read with Flaherty’s ideas in mind.

In celebration of the recent release of the book-cum-movie Gone Girl, I’d like to join the antagonist of that story in lamenting one of literature’s most irritating clichés: the quirky girl. Beach read though the book is, and psychopathic though Amy the Antagonist may be, her character offers an impressively well constructed perspective on the heroine that we, as readers, have come to take for granted. In Gone Girl, Amy launches a complex and twisted revenge plot in order to get back at her husband, who she feels has forced her to pretend to be the beloved “cool” girl for years in order to keep up with his unrealistic standards. Amy argues that this girl that men everywhere lust after doesn’t exist. I have to agree.

Contemporary popular literature is littered with her. The first time you see her, she’s nothing special–a little odd-looking, even. But after a few weeks or months of getting to know her you realize she’s the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen and she doesn’t even know it. She’s always doing something crazy and irresponsible: jumping into strangers’ pools fully clothed, adopting five puppies at once, and yet her life never seems to truly suffer from her reckless, adolescent behavior. She can hang with the guys but you would never call her masculine. She has an endearing and unusual hobby, like making coffee tables out of bottle caps or watching foreign films from the 1940s. She’s attractive, smart, funny, and interesting, yet somehow she’s still shy in social situations and thus has been dubbed “the weird girl” by her peers, but you know better. You fall in love with her suddenly, you never saw it coming, but the readership knew from the very first paragraph.

Literature’s quirky girl is closely related to the “manic pixie dream girl” of the movies, a term coined by film critic Nathan Rabin: “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” (Think Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer.) The manic pixie dream girl exists to teach the male protagonist to be himself and break loose from life’s rigid structures, a duty often undertaken by the quirky girl, although occasionally the gender roles are reversed in her case. Some perfect male specimen glimpses the beauty behind the quiet and convinces her to embrace her quirks for all the world to see.

The primary difference between the dream girl and the quirky girl lies in the latter’s–excuse the pun–bookishness. The dream girl tends to be frothy and feminine, while the quirky girl is smarter, more reclusive, with occasional dark flashes in her character. This tinge to her personality tricks the reader into thinking she may prove to be more complex than she is, but inevitably, the reader is disappointed. We need look no further than the bestseller lists of the past decade or so to see the evidence: Bella in Twilight; Anastasia in Fifty Shades of Gray; Sam in The Perks of Being a Wallflower; and so on. Although she has saturated the bookshelves more recently, the quirky girl is no new phenomenon. We saw her in Salinger’s genius-quirk girl Franny Glass and Harper Lee’s grit-quirk girl Scout.

My problem with the quirky girl is that authors insist on painting her as improbably awkward, shy, or insecure. If a girl possessing her amazingly diverse array of attributes existed, she would almost certainly not have such crippling social anxiety and lack of friends. And if we’re to believe that she really is somehow socially isolated or “different,” then let’s see a character who actually is kind of weird. She can still be charming and pretty and quirky and be a real human being with unsettling flaws as well: see Maura in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. The quirky girl is flat, dimensionless; her flaws, if any, are minor and easily forgivable, even loveable. (“Quirk” and “flaw” are not synonyms.) She is beyond, at least for me, the willingness to suspend disbelief.

What do you think, readers? Is my interpretation of the quirky girl too harsh or generalized? Does she play a more important role than I realize? Most importantly: do we think she’s here to stay?

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” This often-quoted line from Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a simple statement, but nonetheless profound in its acknowledgement of the literary tradition. Reading widely and well arms the author with knowledge of context and craft that can elevate a piece from good to great. Brain Pickings published an informative chart illustrating the “Circles of Influence” that produced some of today’s most popular artists. Sometimes it’s easy to trace a writer back to formative influences: H.P. Lovecraft begets Stephen King, for example. Other times, an author’s literary lineage comes as a surprise. Lord Byron certainly wouldn’t make it on my list of Lemony Snicket’s main influences. Distinguishing influence becomes even trickier when artists collaborate, and it can become impossible to discern who impacted who.

The source of this problem resides in the mechanism behind the circles of influence. Literary influence isn’t always the conscious process King describes. It isn’t always a writer equipping tools. Brain Pickings describes the process of intellectual exchange more as “the cross-pollination of disciplines across science, art, literature, film and music.” Sometimes, it’s more of an unconscious influence, one as pervasive and natural as pollination. What you read influences what (and how) you write.

You are what you read. It’s a variation on an old cliché, but like most clichés, its merit lies in a truism. We now know that reading can change how your brain works, so the logical progression follows that reading can also change your writing. I remember my visceral horror when one of my writing mentors described the phenomena in the wake of Twilight in the YA lit boom. Increasingly, her students wrote about characters “chuckling darkly” with “piercing eyes.” Stephenie Meyer had trickled into the shared consciousness of adolescents everywhere. Being an omnivorous reader, the subject matter didn’t scare me as much as the concept. I hated the idea that I didn’t control my own writing, as I have never been one to subscribe to the concept of the literary muse. Of course, I welcomed influences, but I wanted to be consciously aware of them. I wanted to choose and cultivate, not plant a mystery seed and watch, breath bated, as it grew.

For a brief period, I embarked on a literary detox. No more beach reads. No more books written for younger audiences. I waited until I was sufficiently satisfied that nothing remained but my own voice. Then I stocked up on some of the literary greats. Soon I noticed the way authors leaked into my own writing. I read some Faulkner novel that I could not really understand (but pretended to understand because I was too proud to admit otherwise) and I decided to write. Upon placing my fingertips to keyboard and typing I started spinning out lengthy and labyrinthine sentences the meanings of which I also probably could not understand but there on the screen they glowed profoundly. I also took it upon myself to read Jane Eyre, after which, my diction shifted to a positively comical mix of modern and Victorian. My thoughts veered into profoundly existential territory for a freshman in high school. I felt like a mime and a fraud. Not once did I consider that maybe I took myself too seriously, and that maybe this was a universal problem I experienced. Fortunately, my stint of detox only lasted until the publication of the next YA box office hit. I realize now that it was all a part of the process of finding my voice.

So what about you? Have you ever noticed the circle of influence impacting your voice? Is this something to be celebrated, or are more literary detoxes in order?