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"A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to
tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise." - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This quote caught my eye because Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind hooked me with the first
beautifully-written sentence: "I still remember the day my father took me
to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time." This literary
mystery introduces Daniel, son of an antiquarian bookseller who finds solace in
a "forgotten" book that leads him to discover one of Barcelona's darkest secrets.
If you love books and mysteries, this one will captivate from the start and
stay with you long after the final line.
Beyond admiring the author's work, I'm intrigued by the idea
that in writing a story, the author is writing herself a letter. The more I've thought
about this, the more I like the concept. I can sit down to write, and whether
it's a short story, or a longer piece, I invariably take some detours and make
turns I didn't plan on, and in fact didn't know were there until I was upon
them. When rereading earlier-written parts of a longer piece, they can sometimes
seem a bit unfamiliar. Perhaps that’s a result of the muse taking over.
I exchange actual handwritten letters with a few friends. Writing
those letters is like creating a story each time in that the pleasure is in the
telling. And invariably, between answering questions posed in a letter I'm
replying to and telling the recipient what I've been up to, I'll take a turn I didn't
anticipate. Humans have always been storytellers, from the days of scrawling on
cave walls. Turns out, we often tell those stories to ourselves.
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