Writers are the people who tell stories. Who do you think readers are?
Barbara Sanchez
Hi Barbara,
I think we are all story people.
I think we — writers and readers and those of us who are both — are all people who want stories. I think we respond so strongly to certain stories because in some way we are those stories; or we want to become them; or we fear becoming them. They speak to us of our own hopes, joys, risks, griefs, our compromises and our stubborness, our will and our failures of will. Or they show people just like us being heroes, larger than life, bigger and brighter, burning in ways we would like to burn if only we could.
And some of us are moved to make our own stories. I don’t know about other writers, but I write the stories that in some way I want to live, or hope to never live. I bring up stories from places of great yearning and ecstasy and fear. Sometimes those things are expressed quietly, sometimes at full volume, but even the gentle stories come from places that are full of storms.
Is it better to make one’s own stories? Nope, just a different way to live in the heart of one’s own imagination. Because whether we write our own work or read someone else’s, that’s what we’re doing — living the story, bringing it inside us and making it our particular and individual own. The act of reading is an act of creation, as surely as writing is. In the end, we are all telling the story to ourselves.
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