During my school years, despite my constantly growing love for reading, no trace of a serious interest in writing came. The composition class, in which students were supposed to learn how to write, was either stressful or boring. Thinking about compulsory writing on a pre-determined topic inside a time limit itself made me nervous. I disliked conventional topics like “What’s your favourite season?” or “What are the benefits of sheep?” or “Science or Wealth? Which one is better?” I had zero tolerance for so-called literary subject matter, because I had no talent for writing what seemed to me redundant nonsense. While the topic required logical thinking and argument, I felt comfortable enough to put pen to paper, though, even in this case, the fact that writing was not an option hindered me from enjoying it. Moreover, unlike many teen-agers, I didn’t write journals. My writing adventure only consisted of a sudden unexpected urge to write a story-like text. This only occurred once or twice as an involuntary reaction or impression, and after a while I threw the result into the wastepaper basket. Years later, during my first university years, the urge overwhelmingly returned, maybe because university disappointed me. This time I immediately knew how serious it was. It was absolutely out of my control. I had a very clear physical reaction: I felt something inside me, not only in mind but in body too, that forcefully sought a way out. I would wander around the campus, day after day, looking for a corner out of people’s sight to write chapters of a novel. The result of this second attack, although obtained easily and almost automatically, was also added to the trash bin. In discarding it, I wanted to see if the compulsion was strong enough to come back to me again. Besides, I convinced myself there could be no regret in ditching the manuscript of a first novel because I now felt that I could write anytime I liked.
Such was the start of my writing odyssey, a process of laborious effort and emotional ups and downs that has never been satisfactory, despite its occasional pleasures. When I realized that it was inevitable, I started to educate myself through methods tailored to my own needs and interests. Besides my constant search for gems of world literature, I found Persian literature. As eclectic as before, this time I gave myself rules and disciplined myself to get the most of my reading. This added a new dimension and function. Doubtless what I’d read before had educated me indirectly. But now I was aware of the learning process. Gradually, for the benefit of writing, I developed a second reader inside myself. While the first reader simply searched for the “joy of reading”, the second one was a student industriously looking for learning materials. The second reader’s goal was to discover the deep source of the first reader’s joy. In doing that, she had to be an up-to-date, well-read reader, with sufficient knowledge about language, culture, literature, and other subjects; yet, first and foremost, she was to probe into the variations and forms of narratives to recognize their parts and details and to understand their structural unity. The achievements of the second reader were only a means to an end, the development of the first reader’s sensibility.
This aside, another great function of reading has been its ability to inspire, essential to my fiction writing. Whether inspiration, the holy spark, comes from a mysterious source, or from the way something happens to you, is unclear to me. Whether it is a divine blessing, or a simple probability among infinite ones, I’d like to see it as an exquisite butterfly that alights on me, sometimes for a moment, sometimes as long as it can find a secure place in a corner of my mind to make its cocoon. But what are these butterflies? An image, a sound, a scent, a touch, or a taste. Or even a simple letter or word. It might be a real scene, a concrete event, a tangible thing, or something completely imaginary. Whatever it is, it comes from the world outside me, from nature and its inhabitants, from others, either their realities or their imaginations. Thus, others’ writings are where I may hunt butterflies for my own.
I tend to believe that one can’t write about life without living it. However, a writer like Borges proves that, for some writers, reading might be the most vigorous action and actual adventure, something that can replace, or be, real-life experience. My personal experience demonstrates my strong need to live with my all capacity and calibre. Yet I cannot ignore how forcefully some of my readings preoccupy my mind, and in fact occupy my life. Through the years of pleasure and challenge, reading has revealed interesting aspects of its role, from the informative to the educative, from provoking thought to motivation and inspiration. Nonetheless, as a born day-dreamer, what fascinates me most is the impact of my reading of narratives on my mind. That some stories, read once, keep living with me and in me, always surprises me. Sometimes I attribute their high impact to their quality, and rate them thus. But I sense that there are other unknown factors probably not pertinent to their quality. Regardless of any judgment, what matters is that these narratives, or in many cases, vestiges of influential stories, are active parts of my intellectual life in a way that I can claim that I’ve lived them. They are neither data filed and stored in my mind’s drawers, nor mere recollections. Whether they are a scene, an image, a gesture, a dialogue, or a character, they are as alive as their counterparts in my own writings.
This leads me not to discriminate between the characters created by other writers and by myself. In terms of the present, some characters from my readings are more alive than characters in my writings. Sometimes I doubt if a character comes from my reading or from my writing. I may not remember the names of their creators. In the world they live in, the creators have no importance or dignity. The coexistence of all these characters gives me the pleasure of sharing myself with others as well as sharing others with myself. One may say that it manifests our undeniable need for each others’ imagination and intellects. It also proves that the realm of our imaginative world, literature and art, is a land without borders where I’d like to live and die, not only with my fantasies but in the actual act of writing and reading.
New Haven, July 2006
Bookmark/Search this post with:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
