*If you’re lucky enough.
To start with, I truly think that ANYBODY can read whatever they want and write whatever they want. As Stephen King puts it, you only become a writer when you read and write, and you don’t really need to attend writing classes or seminars. A lot of the advice he shares on that blog post I wholeheartedly agree with: write for yourself first, don’t obsess over grammar, and research shouldn’t burden the story you’re trying to tell (Other pieces of advice, I’m not so keen on. Adverbs I love you dearly, adamantly, most ardently. You can pry them savagely from my cold dead hands).
Yet, whereas being able to read and write whatever and whenever you want should be a right, it is made a privilege that not many people realize, much in the same way that perfect English grammar is. Sometimes people have to work all day to support their families and they’re too tired by the end of the day to write down their ideas for the next great novel; sometimes the publishing industry deems your ideas as unmarketable; sometimes you come from a country where books are worth several years’ wages.
Education is a basic human right. Information changes the world, stories inspire others. There were whole revolutions over the right to be educated. Never trust anybody who says they’re against education, they want to keep you in the dark about something, to prevent you from being able to have the tools to dissect what’s wrong with society and being able to fix it.
Doris Lessing’s lecture on not winning the Nobel Prize is one of the most moving and insightful pieces I’ve read in a while. She recounts her experiences living in Zimbabwe and how children and adults there were eager to read anything they could get their hands on after learning to read. But books were expensive, and sometimes libraries were nothing more than “plank on bricks under a tree.”
I’m going to be honest, the ending almost made me cry. “We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.” Lessing’s students in Zimbabwe want to read the same things European or American people want to read—romance, fantasy, science fiction— and perhaps they would like to publish their own stories too. But the fact that books must be donated and covered up for protection and that a publishing scene can only be talked about as if it were a dream points to a larger structural issue that has its roots in classim, racism, and colonialism.
But this blog post is not about diving into how colonialism is a parasite. I simply don’t have the tools or credibility to be able to deconstruct that topic with the nuance it deserves. This post is, however, about how I am lucky to be able to read and write whatever and whenever I want, where others are not so lucky. And yet the thing that connects us all is our love for stories and being a storyteller; our hopes for getting something worthwhile out of our education; learning for the sake of curiosity. I don’t know if I could change the world, but I know a good book can, even if it’s a tattered piece of Anna Karenin.
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