Music Box

So once upon a time there was a girl and she was too small to carry around all the love she had inside her and once her pockets overflowed and once her backpack grew too full her mother bought her a music box to keep it all in but when she opened up the music box she found a little trinket boy inside with the most sincere smile and smooth glass hands and the brightest eyes and he wasn’t antique but he had seen a lot and he was too small to live in such a dark and empty place alone so the girl built him a bed out of her spare affections and she built him an armoire and she built him dozens of birds to sing to while she was away and soon the boy wasn’t so lonely but the girl still had so much left to give so she made him a garden of violets and she fashioned him a heavy blanket out of her excess fondness and she gave him so much sunlight and the music box boy had never thought so much love could live inside one person and each time the girl lifted the lid to see him he would spin and spin and sing every pretty word he could think of until he had to start making them up and he wished that he could build her things too but the girl insisted all she wanted was to hold him but the girl knew that he was too delicate to take out of the music box and she was more afraid of living without him than she was afraid of never getting to touch him so she gave him clouds and stars to wish upon and she built him oceans and fish and orange roses and she gave him so many things to smile at when she was away until the little trinket boy grew tired of being fragile and he climbed out of the music box and despite how breakable he seemed he clattered across the dresser and tucked himself in her coat pocket and he begged to make her laugh and he begged her not to keep him as a knickknack anymore and he swore he wouldn’t chip or crack if she carried him around he swore he could be precious and still be strong he swore there was more to him than pretty words and careful tunes and the girl only smiled and pulled a bit of love from her pocket to make more room in there for him.

Thomas Benke: Looking Around In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, in the Chapter “Looking Around,” says this: Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another. Otherwise we’d all just be barking away like Pekingese: “Ah! Stuck in the shit! And it’s your fault, you did this …” Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can’t do that if you’re not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you’re going to get them wrong. She goes on to speak about empathy for other people and also, as an extension empathy for yourself. So, in a sense as you try to write believable, relatable characters, you will come to forgive people their trespasses—because no one believes they are the villain of their story, so you have to write “bad,” or “evil” characters from a point of view where they rationalize what they are doing in such a way that it is the right or only way they see is possible. By extrapolation, then, if you begin to forgive and withhold judgment from your less-than-desirable, or annoying characters, perhaps you can extend the same courtesy to yourself and forgive your own trespasses and sins. This, for me, starts to enter the realm of “writing as therapy,” and though I am a firm believer in that—I practice it to this very day—I think I would caution anyone who thinks that simply writing through things is going to lead you to a place of light and love. I am not saying it can’t by any means. What I am saying is I have wrote through my thoughts and my problems and my desperation and depression for decades and I still had enough baggage on my shoulders to supply an army platoon with rations for a year. In any case, when thinking about craft, it is very important to step into the shoes of all of your characters, especially those characters that you see as antagonists and villians. I believe there are very few universal maxims in writing but one thing is virtually certain: every character you write is your version of that human being. Confucius said “everywhere I go, there I am,” and that is never more true than when you are writing. So if you are writing a character that is distasteful to you, it might be effective for you to ask yourself why that is the case. I wrote a blog for Obscura last semester titled, “The Puppy Had It Coming.” The gist of the article was to pose a puzzle to writers. How can you write a scene where an adult human kicks a puppy across the room and the reader at least understands why. I am not saying there is any way to justify the action or for the readers to be on the human’s side unless they are sociopaths. I am saying you need let the reader know how dark the place is in the character’s mind that he is capable of doing that.

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