When I was young I wanted to be a writer. Mostly because I loved books, books
held a magical power over me. And
I was such a bookworm. While my
healthy active sister played outside with neighbors, I liked to sit inside with
a pile of library books, solitary.
I think I went so far as preferring books to people. My greatest anxiety in life was that
there were too many books in the world, and I would not be able to read all of
them before I died. It took me
awhile to realize that not all books are worth my time. But to this day, I still get slightly
depressed at the fact that there are worthwhile books and movies that I will
never cross paths with. This
is the power stories have over me.
I remember as
early as I was 9 or 10, I would have spiral notebooks filled with a few failed
attempts at writing a novel. Every
night I would lie in bed dreaming of characters and plots and how to begin my
novel. But beginnings were all I
had. I never got beyond three
chapters before I decided my story was stupid and boring, and then I would go
make up another one.
This is why I gave up this dream. I felt I never had any interesting stories to tell.
I did not lack encouragement. Once in awhile I would have something published or win a
small school-wide writing competition, and I came across teachers from
elementary school through college who had good things to say about my writing,
and they tried to encourage me to polish my grammar, learn more vocabulary, and
read more books. (My writing in
Mandarin has always been plagued by some type of English style grammar and vice
versa…).
Other than that there was a deep feeling that I couldn’t
write interesting stories, that I hadn’t experienced enough of life or human
nature to actually write about life and human nature. And I was always an ambitious girl- I wanted my work to be
moving, important, profound!
Laziness and ambition are a bad combination. No it is not an impossible
combination. These people are what
we call dreamers. I guess I am a
dreamer. So it is in part laziness
I chose to be a scientist, where the material for the stories I would tell were
in some sense “written in the stars”.
I just had to learn the language to tell them.
But now, I am trying to be “un-lazy” by blogging about my
mundane life. It was actually Sumiran,
my office-mate who accidentally motivated me to start doing this. We were talking one day and as usual I
was blabbering and going into detailed descriptions about the origin of my
every statement (this my friends somehow bear patiently while hiding their annoyance). And Sumiran made an observation: “You
talk like a writer.” I was amused,
“How? Why?” “The way you seem to
be thinking about how to say things…”
And I admitted to him I love writing. I crave to write something important! Gigantic! Magnificent! Somehow he pushed me in the direction
of “start somewhere, start small.”
And so I started this blog.
