Box Full of Letters

 

                           Photo by Anthony Shkraba via Pexels

"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.

Beyond Expectations

As a reader, you form a unique and intimate relationship with the author of a beloved book, especially one you fall in love with as a child. Norton Juster, author of the book of my childhood, The Phantom Tollbooth, passed away at the age of 91 on Monday. Learning that fact left me a little sad. I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Juster, and yet I feel as though I lost a family friend.

Besides further cementing my lifelong love of reading, the adventures of Milo and Tock the watchdog ignited my imagination and first planted the idea that writing could be fun. What an incredible gift. I'm guessing other writers and voracious readers felt the same way: graduating from picture to chapter books was a big deal. We were really reading, and we felt ready to take on anything.

For those unfamiliar with this charming, enduring story, Milo is a little boy bored by everything, until the day he finds that a tollbooth has mysteriously appeared in his room. (For the record, this SoCal kid had no earthly idea what a tollbooth was). Because he has nothing better to do, Milo sets off to the Lands Beyond, meeting wonderfully eccentric characters along the way, including Tock, the watchdog who ticks, the Humbug, a witch named Faintly Macabre, and the warring Kings of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis.

The book was published in 1961, but not everyone in the publishing world embraced it, claiming the ideas were beyond children and the vocabulary was too difficult. Seriously? Juster's reply to such ridiculous criticism was to say, "There is no such thing as a difficult word. There are only words you don't know yet — the kind of liberating words that Milo encounters on his adventure." Well said. Rest in peace, Mr. Juster, and enjoy your journey to the Lands Beyond.