It’s All Leibniz’s Fault I’m a Writer
The dude invents calculus and they name a cracker after him. That makes sense.
I don’t know about you, but I can pinpoint the first few books that got me started on a life of serious reading. And as all writing careers are established after a good deal of reading, I guess you could say they got me started toward becoming a writer.
Now I’m not counting all the books that I read as a kid. I read pretty much everything I could as a kid, but most of it wasn’t serious reading. I mean, I wasn’t thinking too seriously about anything, let alone the books I was reading. Instead, I read Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island because they involved the ocean and treasure and pirates and what have you. (Before I learned about scurvy, I aspired to be a pirate).
It wasn’t until I was 16 that I started actually analyzing the books I was reading—how they worked, what they were really saying, all that. I’d recently taken the one and only philosophy class offered at my middle-of-nowhere high school (I ended up majoring in the stuff) and in the class I read a bunch of Nietzsche and Sartre and Leibniz. Leibniz—and especially his Theodicy—was particularly baffling. I’ll spare you the boring details, but Leibniz was trying to deal with the old problem of evil in a world supposedly created by an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God. Leibniz’s (in)famous response was that this was “the best of all possible worlds,” as he was implicitly acknowledging a limit on God’s power. To get the best mix, God had to allow some evil into things, as that was the best he could do.
Of course, at 16, I didn’t read it like that. Instead, I giggled and guffawed and was amazed at how silly this Leibniz guy was because anyone could imagine a better world. (Never mind the fact that this guy essentially discovered calculus in his spare time. What did he get for his trouble? An international fight with Newton—a noted apple-thrower—and a brand of crackers named in his honor.)
Anyway, Voltaire did a bit more than giggle in Candide, as I discovered after I stumbled across a Norton-anthology-like collection of the world’s great literature in a bookstore in Colorado (of all places). Only one volume was actually in the store (volume 2)—and it was falling to pieces—but I bought it anyway and my literary life started with some well-known French fellas, among them, Moliére, Racine, and Voltaire. Candide was the first piece I read. Naturally, I loved it, and more than that, it was the first book I really took time to think about, to analyze; it was the first book I had thought enough about that I could have written intelligently about.
In short, it woke me up. After that I was reading all sorts of folks—both the well-known (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut) and more random selections (Goethe, François La Rochefoucauld, all of Lorca?). Some of those writers (like Byron), I’ve left behind, but others I keep going back to, no matter how many times I’ve read them. (Mark Strand, Russell Edson, Marvin Bell, Billy Collins, etc.)
So here’s my question—which writer(s) got you started? I imagine there will some of the usual suspects here, but I bet there are some less than well-known folks too. How do you view those books now? Guilty pleasures? The Gold standard? Are they as good as they once were? Better? Can reading a book for the 2nd time (or fifth, or whatever) ever compete? (I imagine that if the answer to that question is yes, then that’s the definition of a great book. In any case, that’s neither here nor there.)
I took a rather different path to becoming a writer. I was writing scenes and creating stories by third grade a lot from dreams I had or images that popped up in my head. The books I was reading at the time? Every boy and his dog book ever made (there are really no girl and her dog books, talk about a gender imbalance), Julie and the Wolves, Elf Quest, my first adult geared novel, Shapeshifters, and all the fairy tales and myths I could get my hands on. Not exactly serious reading. I suppose I’d have to say what got me started was genre novels and children’s books, and fairy tales and myths. I always new I wanted to write, but I didn’t start analyzing writing, other than a few random what is it about this book I find so compelling moments, until I took a novel class in college- around the same time I took a class on existentialism, how curious. (My podunk high school didn’t have any philosophy classes, and although I was one of the original members of the philosophy club, we only met a couple times and didn’t read anything for it). A few years later I took a class on analyzing mythology, followed by more classes on media studies and I would have to say that is when I started to “wake up” to the rest of the story, again mythology, Northwestern Mythos, and genre novels, among others in my media class we took apart a romance novel. My real literary explorations started after that in Eastern. (I have a tendency to get lost and turned around driving too, so it should be no surprise it takes me longer to get places.)
Now, after all that, I just recently went back to one of my favorite books from before, Ender’s Game, that I always thought of as more than the standard genre novel, and I found it did have a lot more, more than I understood the first time I read it. It was better this second time around. I also remember reading and loving Tale of Two Cities when I was in high school, so I might have to try that one again too.
I wonder how many of us have a philosophy connection?
Did you start writing first, or thinking about what you were reading?
I caught the writing bug from MAD magazine and Dr. Demento (particularly when he played Weird Al tunes) in the mid-to-late ’70s. I loved all the rhymes, satire and word play. I’ve always been an audially inspired writer; I hear a voice, a phrase, a piece of dialogue and I see where it takes me. I was caught plagiarizing a poem about baseball from MAD magazine when I was in 5th grade, then I began writing poems on my own. As far as books…
Jump ahead to college. If someone had asked me my freshman year what books or how many I had read, I could not honestly have named more than a dozen. I’d read that biography of Jim Morrison every teenager in America read back in 1980. I had to read two Flannery O’Conner novels in 10th grade English (the second time I took it) but I don’t think I finished either of them. Manchild In The Promised Land, by Claude Brown. And some books about Hank Aaron and Hitler that I’d read in elementary school. That was pretty much it. Claude Brown showed me that writing was not exclusively for nerds. In college I was introduced to Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. At that point, I was pretty much sold. Loved all that voicy FTW stuff. I’d been keeping journals full of “poetry” (bad rock lyrics) for a few years, but these guys had me thinking of prose. Then I began writing letters to the friends I’d made in college who lived in far off places and they recommended I write fiction. And you can see where that advice has gotten me.
In high school I fell in love with a gay writer. He was not only beautiful and had a cool apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill that was filled with book shelves, he was also brilliant. His first book, the one I read in high school, is _Landscape, Memory_. I saw him read from it at the Burke Museum Cafe–it was my first reading. He and all his friends were clever and spoke eloquently, using big words and describing things freshly. They made talking– something I had not yet taken to–seem exciting and fun. I wanted to be just like them. I think that is what did it. Along with reading the high school girl’s usual faves–Plath, Woolf, Lorrie Moore. They all seemed to suffer (as I did in high school) and they put their suffering to such good use.
In high school I fell in love with a gay writer. He was not only beautiful and had a cool apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill that was filled with book shelves, he was also brilliant. His first book, the one I read in high school, is _Landscape, Memory_. I saw him read from it at the Burke Museum Cafe–it was my first reading. He and all his friends were clever and spoke eloquently, using big words and describing things vividly. They made talking– something I had not yet taken to–seem exciting and fun. I wanted to be just like them. I think that is what did it. Along with reading the high school girl’s usual faves–Plath, Woolf, Lorrie Moore. They all seemed to suffer (as I did in high school) and they put their suffering to such good use.
Sorry, this wouldn’t send and then it did and did again.
I too read anything and everything as a kid, but it never occurred to me I might someday become an author. Actually, the apple thrower “made” me turn to writing. On my way to becoming a researcher in Cell Biology, I had to take physics…Sigh. I actually dedicated one book to Newton, without whom I’d never have become an author.
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