this weekend, i had the luxury of wandering aimlessly in a bookstore. a dangerous thing, i tell you, when i'm starving to sink my teeth in an engrossing book. it's especially dangerous when it's boxing week sale at chapters. i spotted amy tan's "The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings." i really didn't need to buy any more books, so thank goodness my rationale part of my brain thought ... why not just borrow the book from the library?
i'm done about a quarter of the book of amy tan's memoirs. amy tan moved a lot of times in her childhood, changed lots of schools and had a mother who liked to "scare her straight" (that's my inference). isolation or alienation seems to be a common theme of great or notable writers. she expresses this process of being alone or alienated as painful, but beneficial, in the writing process. she does say that this alienation is not a prerequisite for producing good writing.
as a former "writer" of non-fiction (aka news), i identified with amy tan's comments on the relationship of alienation and writers. ever since i was little, i've pretty much adopted the viewpoint of an observer. i kept journals throughout high school and university (paper version before blogs were in use) maybe it was a coping mechanism for moving eight or nine times by the time i was 14 years old. or attending five different schools by the time i hit grade 5.
being alone allows writers to have the physical, mental and emotional space to mull over random tangents or think through ideas and their premises and implications. alone time is so precious when synthesizing life experiences and mental processes ... to attempt to make sense or explain things. this seems rather obvious, but there's a paradox: in order to produce a work that has somewhat universal appeal, the writer must retreat into alienation in order to craft the nuances and details of the story.
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