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Starting Out by Téa
Obreht June 13, 2011 I was an
awkward child. Tall, gangly, and, like everyone else in my family,
severely
myopic. Although the condition had not presented itself in my relatives
until
their early teens, I was wearing glasses by the age of three. By the
time I was
ten, my eyesight had deteriorated to such an extent that the
optometrist was
unsure what to predict for middle age, at which point, he suspected,
binoculars
would have to be cabled to my ears. (Luckily, these protruded, so they
were
likely to accommodate the weight.) I had my grandfather’s front teeth,
betwixt
which stood a yawning space that in his smile looked kind and wizened
but in
mine looked vaguely psychotic and caused a lisp. I was also missing an
upper
cuspid, which never grew in. Add to this the fact that my mother and my
grandmother—who are, notwithstanding, very fashionable women—believed
in the
eighties. I mean, really believed, and still dressed me accordingly in
1995:
neon yellows and oranges were the order of the day, and headbands were
encouraged. I was required to wear a white cotton undershirt wherever I
went,
lest I catch a chill from one of those “drafts” which, as any former
Yugoslav
will tell you, often cause sudden death. But, in the social hierarchy
of
school, this host of miseries was overlooked in favor of a much more
contemptible indignity: I wanted to be a writer. This fact,
which I proclaimed upon arrival in middle school, was a source of
considerable
mirth for the powerful few who dictated the social tide. I had
announced it on
my first day as naturally as I had given my name, because it was
already part
of how I saw myself, as fundamental to me as sleeping and breathing; it
had
never occurred to me that I should conceal my love of writing, that
it—and not
the well-worn “four-eyes”—might arm the greetings of near-strangers in
the
hall. “Hey, are you writing?” they would say, when I was lacing my
sneakers or
standing in the cafeteria line. “Are you gonna write this down?” The
only
comeback I could muster was to chide my assailants on their lack of
imagination—to which I remember one girl replying, “Shut up! I
imaginate all
the time!” By the time
I got to high school, I had learned to be more cautious about revealing
my
dreams. I was reading—and therefore writing—adventure stories. This was
before
I’d read Isak Dinesen and Mikhail Bulgakov, before Ernest Hemingway and
T.
Coraghessan Boyle, before I’d read something and really felt it, when
writing
was still just a compulsion, and my teen-age brain was only bordering
on
sentience. I filled pages of white space with swashbuckling,
rapier-wielding,
sidekick-sacrificing, dragon-baiting romance. At one point, I had three
or four
stories going at once, and I went over them in my head all day. Finally
I broke
down and told a friend. To my surprise, he asked to see my work. I remember
the nervous excitement of that first submission. I remember how my
clean,
crisp, paper-clipped pages looked as they slid into the maw of my
friend’s
backpack. I also remember how they looked two days later, in the hands
of someone
else, a girl I loathed, with whom my friend had shared them, unable to
contain
his amusement, and the way my prose, on which I had spent careful
hours,
sounded when rolling loudly off the tongue of someone who hated me, how
ridiculous it seemed, every word of it trite, the girl’s mockery, in
which
others joined, deserved. The kind of fiction in which I indulged, thank
God,
belonged to the “Chronicles of Prydain” variety, so I had encountered
no
literary precedent for the “engorged members” and “quivering porcelain
mounds”
that would surely have spelled out a far more persistent social doom.
As it
was, snippets of my prose were hurled back to me from the lips of three
or four
passersby for a few days, and then I ceased to be interesting. I hid
the floppy
disk in a drawer and never found my way back to it. That I kept writing is incidental; we all make these kinds of mistakes. (I am the sister of a ten-year-old boy who is busy making them now.) With any luck, they do not deter us from what we want to become. And sometimes we benefit from them. To this day, if I am dissatisfied with my work or frustrated by it, the question I ask myself is “If this came out in print now, would I be able to bear hearing it quoted to me?” If the answer is no—and it often is—I go back to my desk and start again. ♦
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