ARDEN 2004 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: art, photography, short stories, prose, poetry, fiction
Published: 2004-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Why I Write Jennifer Roach

When I was in middle school, my best friends were Rebecca and Krissie Taylor, Randy Harding, Nell Peters, and Joshua Chrissly They weren't great friends, though; Krissie shot herself with her father's pistol. Randy died of a heart attack at his own wedding, and Josh kicked over from cancer that he had been battling for years. Nell refused to go back to work as a candy striper at the hospital after her patient died, and Becky had a nervous breakdown, ran away from home, became a junkie, abandoned all her old friends, and started seeing apparitions of her dead sister on bridges during thunderstorms. Come to think of it, they were awesome friends; they did everything I told them to do.

These nutcases were my friends, my creations, the imagination of a similar nutcase. In the two novels that I wrote over the three-year span of middle school, I controlled every last action of these characters, these nonexistent human beings. I made them hurt. I made them love. I made them die. But I couldn't make them live; no matter how hard I tried, I could not bring their suffering from the neat, crisp typewritten pages to the minds and hearts of my readers (Ezra

Pound they were not; they were preteens with about the right amount of imagination to appreciate Beavis and Butthead. But, hey, when you're thirteen, you'll take what you can get). But even I could not always "feel" the characters, and I was their God.

Some would say that this is why I write: for the control over these people, their fictitious lives, their heartbreaks and their joys. In part, this analysis is true. Like the great Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Bill Clinton, the prospect of creating my own little world and having complete control over it (when I have absolutely no control over anything in the real world) fascinates me. I saw my characters as helpless little creatures, little puppets who needed their strings pulled. Yet this is not the true reason why I write.

Over time, I began to see what my problems were with my novels: the characters were not real because the things that I had happen to them were not real; at least, they were not real in my life. I had never had a sister commit suicide, so therefore I did not know how to express the voice of a young fifteen-year-old girl who had witnessed her own sister die. The same was true of all of my melodramatic, Harlequinesque writing; I was simply not made of the fiction author material. I attempted (with no luck) to expansively edit my novels so that their trifling lives could mirror my own, but when I took away their soap opera lives, they became even more limp and lifeless. I had to face the fact that my life was not meant to be the basis of the Great American Novel. So, while I loved my babies dearly, I had to pull the

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